Class 

Book_. 'VU l 
CopyrigiitN 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



j 



Dog Fennel 
the Orient 



By 

CHARLES C. cTHOORE, X. D. D. 

Editor of The Blue Grass Blade, and Author of The 
Rational View and of Behind the Bars, 31498 



"Coelum, non animum, mutant qui trans 
mare currunt. ' ' 



LEXINGTON, KY.: 
JAMES E. HUGHES, Publisher 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS. 

1 wo Copies Receive*) 

AUG 22 1903 

CopyngM Entry 

SAi. >qo5 

LASS XXc.No 
cop y a. 




Copyrighted, 1903, by 
Charles C. Moore and James E. Hughes. 



IS AFFECTIONATELY AND RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED 

TO 

MY WIFE 

MY CHILDREN, MY DAUGHTER-IN-LAW AND MY GRANDSON 

ALSO TO 

ALL FRIENDS OF MYSELF AND OF MY PAPER 
AND TO 

ALL MY FELLOW TOURISTS ON THE MOLTKE ON HER 
CRUISE TO THE ORIENT 



FIAT JUSTICIA COELUM RUAT 



Dog Fennel in the Orient 



CHAPTEE I. 

It was my good fortune to be a passenger on the steamer Moltke 
when it sailed from New York City, on February 5, 1903, bound 
for the Orient and having in its itinerary all the points of greatest 
interest, on and near to, the coasts each side of the Mediterranean, 
as far North as the Black Sea, and as far South as Luxor, Assouan' 
Karnak and Thebes on the Nile, and "doing," more thoroughly 
than any other part, perhaps, Palestine; called by literary license, 
the Holy Land, though were I a strict constructionist as a historian 
I would suggest that such calling, in these days, whatever may be 
true of the past, is a misnomer. 

The Moltke, named, of course, for the hero of the Franco-Prus- 
sian war, is a twin screw steamer. The Germans call it Doppel- 
schraubendamfer, for short. 

The Moltke belongs to the Hamburg-American line and its 
crew of 381 people, all told, are all Germans, and from its Captain, 
Dempwolf, clear down to its smallest boy, they were as fine a com- 
bination of fitnesses for their respective positions as I ever saw in 
any department of life. 

The Captain, "forty years old next June" is, like the boy who 
stood on the burning deck, 

"A creature of heroic blood 
And born to rule the storm." 

He is a typical Teuton and most gracefully blends with the 
dignity and severities of his office the genial amenities and generos- 
ities of the private gentleman. 

The whole cruise was under the management of Thomas Cook 
and Son, and we called ourselves "Cookies." 

I think I utter the almost universal sentiment of the Cookies 
on this cruise, of whom 228 were females, ranging from little tots of 
the feminine persuasion up to one lady of 78 summers— it is not fair 
to give names and ages of ladies— when I say that the Cook's Tour 
Company not only did us justice according to the letter and spirit 
of their contract with us, but that from their various offices that 
are found in nearly all fine cities, the head one being in London, 
and from their agents who traveled with us, the principal ones being 



6 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT. 

the bond/' 1 Wn , p nTir i V erv fast ship, is not the 

The Moltke, though a ven ^ a » d very ^ ^ 

largest or the fastest, hut rt s saidjy ! 
Cooks, and I suppose just to be to mo ^ h 

Statistics are generally propeny traveling with us, 

ture but as all of our readers axe the time , n board 

this tour. ^ inathematmal data about the 

ship. I hope I wall be aliowe ftp deep 

floating home m which we aie t aboard f 

The Moltke was thirtee »™onths o ^ ^ ^ as I 

it Tf the ordinary land-lubber, born tar m t<> ^ 

was, could have seen ^ tons upon tons ol teel rf tQ 
int o the composition of the. Molfe, **mt ^ ^ 
the tops of its masts, as; they la ynr *™ p . 
might naturally have thought of the lines. 
"Poor old Bobinson Crusoe. 
What ever induced you to do so ;. 
Go build you a boat 
That von couldn't make float. 
You funny old Bobinson Crusoe. 
The Moltke cost $1,50.000 J* 5,5 fee t l^^feet broad 
and 45 feet deep. It a da , was 3 96 miles, 
is 403 miles a day Onr greates t ^ ^ m h 

Our average was f ^f"* ^eek the ship moved so smoothly 
On an average of six dais m a »« ™ 1 t ^ climng 

and so qnietly that as we sat m were not at anchor 

table, it was scarcely P^^S^hoW built at some fash- 
in some placid harbor or m mm etega thoroughly 
ionahle resort some where by tl « ^ ^ k hotel in that 
gotten my "sea legs' and go t bad. ^ kerned to me to rock 

power of its engines is 10,000 «m n allowe d to go down 

^XaSrt hiS and brought smt for damages 
cl^ani that I was going to write a book about 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIENT. 



7 



the cruise and asked, as a special favor, that I might, therefore, be 
permitted to go down and see the machinery. He said that he must 
not be known in the matter, but said I could ask the head engineer 
about it. I told the head engineer what the Captain had said. The 
head engineer was very kind to me, made me promise that, in case 
of any accident to myself, I would claim no damage from the ship, 
provided me with a kind and polite guide who gave me some nice 
ravel ings from woolen cloth with which to hold onto the polished 
steel railings of the stiarways, so that I would not get my hands 
greased^ showed me that it was safer to go down the stairs backward, 
and then carefully conducted me through the four stories that were 
occupied by the ship's engines. The most astonishing parts of the 
machinery were the two shafts that turn the screws that propel the 
ship. Each of these shafts is 216 feet long and seventeen and one- 
half inches in diameter. Each is polished as bright as, and turns 
as smoothly as, any part of a fine new sewing machine, though so 
great is their weight that water is kept constantly falling on them 
at the several journals that support them, to keep them from heat- 
ing, though, of course, the finest of lubricants are also used. These 
immense shafts must, of course, pass through the rear of the hull of 
the ship so as to be water tight, even at the great pressure which 
their depth in the water puts upon them. The screws, as they are 
technically called, are two heavy steel wheels, nineteen and one-half 
feet each, in diameter. Each has four wings that set at an angle of 
45 degrees, like the old style wind mills that we all see in the pict- 
ures, and that we on the Moltke saw, in various places, in reality, 
and from the rapid turning of these — I am sorry that I failed to ask 
the number of revolutions per minute — the ship is driven forward, 
or by reversing these the ship is backed, the rudder being, of 
course, used in either event. The engines that drive these screws 
are so independent that in case one was entirely disabled, the ship 
could still run with the other. 

Our entire itinerary was 13,665 miles of which fully 10,000 
miles was done by the ship and yet during all this time, there was 
not, in all the thousands of tons of this complicated machinery even 
a slipped cog in any of its thousands of wheels, or a quarter of a 
second of any hesitancy in any part to do its full duty, any more 
than would every wheel in the clocks on the national observatories 
at Greenwich and Washington. And this is true though some times 
we were in pretty rough seas, sometimes in the fog, or in the dark 
or going in between dangerous islands just to see them. 

So great was the confidence of the Cookies in the gallant ship 
that when, on the return route, we were passing, in the night, be- 
tween Scylla and Charybdis, the proverbs of all that is dangerous 



8 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

io negators. U» ^ of «aeh 

specially ^A^ e Cfe"d rfin^ow hue* with the flags o 
electricity and Chinese lanrems „ t fte muslc f a 

all nations, "tipping the light ™b^ a olirio u S ly, 
splendid hand of ^1^% ^ ^ a ^J s S0; a e ' c ked in the 

rrss! s^Hr.'fe ass 
si-ssi wst^a •«■» — " 

„bl, »rp™.a to M tar t«P«f "^fji J m up to tl« Io, 
regulated by some of the sixt } great diameter flaring 

oftk, ship, ft. tog..t Iras »™th« . «l «* >» « 
out lite tte » * X „,, e 5 ky 4. motio» of 

can » .dj™ « *■ «* cl » StoTS^S, to* from the 

from any one all the money ^emrg ^ enger s, 

danger they were men who would bU ™ e f the life boa t S . 

especially 7^,^^^^* ° f m6 ' ° Q *? T" 
I was not afraid of their gettmg an t Qut of a 

eral principle in economics that blood -J***™ g 
turni bnt neither theyjaor my gmj ^^/^ was 
receive any money for what the? naa snow > h t in an 
nothing in their manner or as heroically 

hour of danger they would not d^eharge ^« £reatest in . 

as any others of the crew of the ship ^ f n disast er 3 
stances of heroism hare ta ; *p C apto^ ^ ^ 

S 3T3SJ SS'St.'S'.tet. o, m. «~ 

Napoleon and Wellington are forgotten. 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



9 



Among the places for guests of the steamer were two elegant 
dining rooms, a social hall or parlor, .there being among these three 
pianos, grill rooms, writing rooms and elegant bath rooms, and state 
rooms. 

My first state room was No. 540, and I suppose there were 600 
state rooms. The more prominent of these were handsomely decor- 
ated with paintings on the walls, and with beautiful carvings in 
wood, on the ceilings and in other prominent places. All of these 
were handsomely lighted with electricity in highly ornamental glass 
globes, there being of these electric lights probably as many as 1,000 
in the whole ship. There was a very complete gymnasium, the 
machinery of which was all operated by electricity." There was a 
library and a post-office, and all mail for passengers oh the ship was 
forwarded by railway or by ships that were not stopping on their 
routes as we were. 

The most popular place during the day and pretty far into each 
night, was the main deck, to walk around which nine times was a 
mile. I estimate that all the walking that I did around this deck, 
and on other decks amounted to 300 miles, but I do not claim that 
the Cooks owe me any rebate for the part of the itinerarv that I 
walked. 

Nearly everybody had steamer chairs that cost $2 extra for the 
round trip and the attendance of the deck stewards that went with 
them. I had no deck chair, though my sister had kindly loaned 
me her steamer rug before I left home, I did not hire a deck chair 
partly because I was quite limited in my means and partly because 
I thought it best to keep up my habits as a farmer by walking a 
great deal. I was never sick during the whole voyage "for a single 
minute except about a week, all told, of seasickness and a chronic 
case of home-sickness. When the two combined against me I was 
very uncomfortable. The balance of the time the "tour was one of 
almost perpetual physical and mental exhilaration. I slept as 
soundly and ate with as keen an appetite as a typical farmer boy, 
though I tried, all the time, to be philosophical in my eating and 
sleeping and exercising. 

I had probably less money than anybody else on the ship. This 
was for the double reason that I did not have the money to spare 
from the comforts of my family and partly because I wanted to 
show to those who might read my book how little money was abso- 
lutely necessary to take one on the cruise to the Orient. 

My regular fare on the ship was $300, and beside this I paid 
$10 for a special trip from Jerusalem and $5 for the special trip up 
the Volcano Vesuvius. 

I had only $18 when I left New York. On the route there 



10 DOG FEXXEL EN THE ORIENT 

$ ' 2 f° r S ^XTa^ 31498 I o-ot liack to *w York with 

myWa ticket that I had got- 

*" ^fflSSSg. taS Sottas in finance w^at 

obligation because it is to employes of partes or 

you have already paid m your contract with ,he «^ 

of the Cookies said, "when we are ' ^ m « v 

them, even m the case of t ich peop e ^ ,..„.,, ,.,„„, 

consideration— xf, indeed people e^el t 

especially to America. J who Jj*"^ people in 

sling's done just inth e rate ^ JSS Wtt. 
tips to domestics is ^^S, a | d that, as a finan- 
beggars of «J> -do ^ ^entertainers of the travel- 
S ffitf^dfl**^ of tips front their patrons 
m8 certlinly a glaring ^ t Wg%£g?J££g> 

tS&SSS ^es^onghC k^he. front beg- 



cannot enjoy, It was th ait t ^der these cvrcmn- 



DOG EEXXEL IX THE OKIEXT 



11 



had as many friends, in the opinion of several who thus expressed 
themselves, as any man on the steamer. 

The rates for passage ranged all the way from $300 up to 
$2,250, the only difference in advantages to the passengers being 
that those who paid the high prices got the finest and most desirable 
state rooms, and that the dining room of ' those who paid the highest 
fares was handsomer than the other. All other things were the 
same. And yet the dining hall of those who paid the lower passage 
rate was quite handsome and their state rooms very neat and com- 
fortable. 

On the return trip all but about 150 of us took the option of 
paying their own expenses across Europe and returning, without 
other cost than that, on any of the ships of the Hamburg-American 
line, and we who remained on the Moltke were all given the finest 
state rooms that had been thus vacated and all changed into the 
finer dining hall. 

The table fare, all the time, was very fine, embracing the finest 
of all fish, meats, vegetables and fruits that I had ever heard of and 
some that were before unknown to me. , As a sample of the variety 
and abundance I recall that the menus showed seven varieties of the 
finest of cheeses, and that we took on at Xew York 1,600 bricks" 
of ice cream, amounting in weight to five tons. We had ice cream 
for every dinner, in all conceivable shapes. Some of it was its nat- 
ural color, and some beautifully colored. Some was in statuettes 
and other fancy figures, sometimes it was illuminated by wax 
candles inside that shone through fancy colored material, and some 
times we had the seeming self-contradiction of baked ice cream, 
that was hot outside and frozen inside. 

One day some one was punning upon the masters of the cu- 
linary art and the name of the managers of our tour, and I quoted, 
with the approval of those present: 

"We may live without poetry, music and art ; 
We may- live without conscience, we may live without heart ; 
We may live without friends ; we may live without books. 
But civilized men cannot live without Cooks." 

Eating on the Moltke, as is true of nearly all other places where 
the people are able to do so, was done to excess. I think we would 
nearly all be more comfortable and happier and better if we ate less. 
We had breakfast at- 7:30 o'clock, lunch at 1 o'clock and dinner at 
7 o'clock p. m., and there were bouillon and tea and coffee and 
crackers and cakes served on the decks at 10 a. m. and at 1 p. m. 
Everything was served in courses, and we occupied more than an 
hour at dinner. 



18 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

There was a complete printing office on board and, in this each 
day th menu cards were printed. The first page wonld contain a 
picture in colors, of the next place we were going to stop, or it that 
was too far ahead, a picture of some ball that we were to have on tiie 
deck or of the people talking and amnsmg themselves m the var 
ions ways that they did on ship-board. _ 

The extraordinary low price for the tonr that I got and of 
which many others who were apparently rich people availed them. 
S£ wa^precedented, and it remains to be seen whether or not 
he public can get the advantage of these m coming years. 

I ladv on board, who had taken seven of these tours old me 
that then-she took the one, last year, the very lowest rate that was 
offered bv anv company was $1,000. 

The' Cooks have been engaged in this touring business tor M 

r^^r^s sets sz^fisz 

TL7£^Mi ^Cl^ party almost as large as 
nrs started out on this same cruise only ^ays af ter u . H 
-i • ' r. \ n ^r av ; Q Thprpsa was larger and taster man ourb, uui wa. 

other. Some of them subscribed for this book. 

Clark in order to get patronage, dropped his lowest price* 
LiarK, in uiucj. & r f> T1 n 00 v s cannot, under 

the back of an ostrich, donkey or man. 

tm d wn nV-es an^t remains to he seen what they will do 

While I eel most kindly toward the Cooks, I cannot with 
V JSk say-Damn the people," ^J^^g* £ 
the lamented Artemus Ward was wont to say. 1 Hope « « 

the Crnsades did It s tne omy ^wd ma intam a 

Pani Our object in this book is to understand all the details of this 
particular tour, as far as you can do that, through my eyes and ears 



BOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 13 

and pen. and therefore I will tell you of the had as well as the good 
on the voyage. 8 

I was seasick, and I think, just like evervbodv else that ever 
had a good case of that miserable malady that I had the worst case 
oi it oi any man who was ever born, and I use the word man as em- 
bracing woman. 

W \ h p w SSeCl thG ° C ? an S00n after our Clvil ™> Parted, on 
foot, to Palestine as you know, or will know, if vou have read, or 
w, read, behind he Bars ; 31498,- and at that time I had suffered 
greatly from seasickness In arranging for this trip, therefore, my 
good wife and I had carefully studied all the preventives of seasick- 
ness, real, or alleged, and I did my best to carry them into effect 
But we had not been one hour out of the harbor of Xew York be- 
fore 1 saw that I was again a doomed man. Life, to me lias beer, 
he proverbial "checkered scene,- and those who know of "ow 
that I have gone through some things that gave me the right to be 
pretty miserable. I am not, . constitutionally, one of those people 
who are never happy unless they are miserable, but I do not pretend 
that I am happy if I am not so, and I believe that in my seasickness 
on the Moltke, I was as intensely uncomfortable as I ever was in 
m ? Me - Everybody belonging to the crew that had. in any way 

' 0t ™ J , r if ° rt jllSt aS kind t0 me as eonkl be, and 
tbP Z i f + °l^ e paSSen - ers that were ^ ^ick, as is generally 
the case, all that had any opportunity to be kind to me were so and 
1 had heard, a thousand times, and had personally known that the 
finest constitutions were those that were most seasick, and that "a 
spell of seasickness is worth more than a course of medicine,- and 
ail that, but T was intensely miserable, ail the same 

I have philosophized much about seasickness and I think I am 
the highest living authority upon that subject. I have added a laro- e 
personal experience to the teachings of the most learned therapeuts 
upon that subject and, for fitting pecuniary consideration, mv ser- 
vices, under this head, are offered to getters-up of first class encyclo- 
pedias. When a man is drunk— so I have been told ; T am a Prohi- 
bitionist— and he walks along a solid pavement it seems to come up 
to meet him, and he vomits. I am sorry to use that word, but it is 
the most decent of all its synonyms. When these conditions are 
reversed and a man, duly sober, walks along a deck of the finest 
Kentucky walnut and the deck really does come up to meet him 
the sober man, on the really rising deck, vomits exactly like the 
drunken man on the apparently rising pavement. 

Among the homeopathists there is a principle expressed by the 
words similia similibus curantur/' This double backaction simi- 
larity between seasickness and what the newspaper reporter* call "a 



DOG KENNEL IN THE OBIENT 



I have, up to tins date, tormu ed to bea fo f 
party who feels hrmself, 01 W me> on t he most availa- 
ble Jess by getting -on ^'^Tte would suggest, as the means 
ble liquor ; and loy alt, to mj. whigky . 
of the lonesome aforesaid, the oesi , • an d, m some m- 

I know, from large ^^^^on Kentucky whisky are 
, tance , women-who have ^J^° e ttat the most hopeless 
t^r^fw^d £ the second case of seasickness 

thei r chronological o^^^Xthat line into this one con- 
I will put the whole of my «^ t0 read abo ut it may skip the 
neetion. so that people who do n ot hke ^ ^ j hope they 

whole subject in one literarY tastes. . _ , 

mar find more congenial t ■ thet hte ^ ^ f ^ 

' While I was trying to grow ^ Mad am Belaud 

ertv on Bedloe's I^^fwdTeeh one. seemed to me to begin 
Rested that much x^ustice W beeii c , ^ t 

to totter upon her ^ff^g^o the sea if the "coppers" 

MSffiE ftSr-* that 1 had hung „ 
my state room. _ Hamburg-American docks, whence 

' The Hudson river, at the H amhurg ^ b j 

we started, only a lew hours before j» fuU ol ^ ^ 
knew every turn of our P«*^™ f the change in climate could 
dimes that we were to w, 1 ^ " first get out of my 

not lie so sudden as to me ^ en u nbutton my vest and stall 
overcoat while I was on dej and th^ ^ . f utjl . 

have . in m y ^f'/, 8 * steam for the ship. 
ize(L could have helped qo uge m m trying to 

I finally said to myself that tneie se asick. bo I 

make a fool of myself by pretending^ that I« b and 

SSJa with myself ^ auydhtng - *e ^ 
drinks that I had stored away m the ^ stEmceS; p ro bablj 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIEXT 15 

walk, that is used in the pictures of Xoah's flood to represent light- 
ning, I went up to the railing of the ship, stuck my head overboard 
and, at one heave, disposed of what seemed to be an unusuallv laro-e 
and variously assorted breakfast. For about a half minute I fell 
some better, though, even in that cold, air, the sweat was so thick 
on my bifocal glasses that I could not see clown to the water. 

In that half minute of suspension of business I determined to 
get into some position where I would not make such a public ex- 
posure of myself, and avoiding the proper route through the steamer 
and out onto the more retired deck that I wanted to gain I half 
walked and half tumbled down a stairway that is primarily in- 
tended for the use of sailors, and I started across that deck which 
was very nice, and afterward proved very popular when we got into 
warm climates, and. the awnings were put up, to gain the railing f 
the steamer and access to the open sea in case of renewed hostili- 
ties between my stomach and myself, but it seemed to me that cliv- 
ers and sundry other breakfasts, dinners and suppers for a week 
past, with intermittent lunches and all the quaint fruits that I had 
been sampling during my stay of several days in Xew York all 
seemed to -consider that writs of ejectment had been served upon 
them, and that, without further contest, they demanded the right 
to vacate the premises, immediately, if not sooner, and before I was 
tairly on the way to the railing I was vomiting with the most reck- 
less disregard of all proprieties, over everything, or anybody that 
came within ten feet of me to the windward, equaled by noth- 
ing m the annals of history that I had ever read of, or seen, except 
the whale m his unpleasantness with Jonah, in which I think the 
whale was seasick, and by Vesuvius which, at that time, I had never 
seen. 

I was willing to be reasonable and call it square and quit at 
that when I was assured that I had thrown up everything that I had 
been responsible for being in my stomach for the last month but 
1 was reckoning without my host. I am a regular college graduate 
and have a large collection of sheepskins certifying to my learning 
m Latin that I could not read when I got them and all of which 
fortunately, were burned up when my house did so that I could not' 
through them, expose my ignorance to my children. But I stood 
well m physiology and thought I knew the names of all the fluids 
that could come out of the human stomach. I recognized a number 
ot these by name and description as I poured liberal samples of 
them just any where that the wind and their various gravities 
located them on floors, chairs, donkey engines, monkey engines 
ropes, chains, tarpaulins, sailors, stewards, Cookies, all .with that 



16 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

utter abandon and disregard of expenses shown by tbe skunk when 

- %*?S5XoV£ £ ^ent bay-^dow on 

b"lv \nd t td bo^'e that I had ever known in my gomg on sixtv- 

but ^St^. -re thoroughly m^thy .th t^tnost 
SS^St — to ebmb tbe * 
stantial railing aronnd the deck and 

-Let the ocean's wave be my winding sheet, 
With the mermaids watching oer me. 

not know eertatnly th« 01 th ufust dayor tw ^ ^ ^ 
clothes or evennxj shoes, 1 lemem an d had explained to 

^f\lS^lSd mlfa See sweetened drink 
out ited £ mucW a^e 

ing loosed the wrapper on tt, because , when I was ^ ^ 
ffi n ° T ^ TT^X^XTJii head of my bed 

without any pay. |) r . T. B. Healy, 

One of my ^ Mass, and 

who was named Fred H. Langdon, from 
the other was a nice youiij , m other. both of the mothers 

f m ^^^ a ^^^ -^exward- as I have 
being sweet iaxiies ana e uuu. ^ myself, 

tohlyoa, I believe, I was given a fine stete room ( M 

tmtoudy. and that vottn L-an and s0 nearly dead 

reason to help me but l ta> u 1 gabject on earth to be 



DOG- FEKNEL IN THE OKIEXT 



17 



during those three days, I took any food or water I do not now re- 
call it, bnt I suppose I took water. After the third day I managed 
to get out on the main deck and felt that I was getting better, but 
I was awful weak. I never took but one drink of whisky — except 
possibly a pint as medicine — in my whole life. That drink was the 
day I graduated at Bethany College, Yirgina, now West Virginia, 
in 1858. About the last three months of my college course I kept 
a keg of fine beer regularly on tap in my room. Vice-President 
Pendleton did the same in the front hall of his residence which I 
frequently visited. After I left college I did not drink any liquor 
of any kind until in 1876, I took one glass of beer with Dr. W. B. 
Smith, (Ph. D.), now a professor in Toulane University in New 
Orleans. Then I never took a drink of any kind of liquor until that 
day I first got out upon the deck of the Moltke ; then I paid ten 
cents for a glass of beer. It touched the spot, and I felt better. 
The next day I similarly invested another ten cents. Same pleasing 
effect; began to feel jolly. Third day another ten cents, another 
glass, and felt my spirits rising like the spirit in a fine thermometer 
to the jolly point, and felt that I was well. But, in the meantime, 
the beer got to be so good to me that on the fourth, fifth and sixth 
days I- took one glass each simply because it was so good that I 
wanted it. Then I stopped, and though I was in countries where 
I could get wine for six cents a bottle, and though wine was offered 
me, by friends, at table, I have not tasted from that time until now 
one drop of any kind of liquor — unless I did it by proxy. The 
Cooks put a bottle of wine in the lunch basket that they provided 
for each of us, to be used on the railroad as we came back from 
Grenada to G-ibralta, and without uncorking it I put it in my bag- 
gage and brought it to my wife. She uncorked it. 

During seasickness one's olfactories obtain powers of perception 
impossible of realization by any one not in that condition. Every- 
thing on earth, sea, or air, has a smell to it and everything vies with 
every other thing to see how infernally bad it can smell, and it 
seems to you that some other Pandora has opened, right under your 
nose, a box of all the worst of all the stenches that the devil ever 
invented. 

Of all of these stenches tobacco smoke, to a seasick man is the 
most diabolical, and I vowed to myself that if ever again I got ac- 
cess to any printing press I would speak my piece about the tobacco 
smoking fiend. We afterward saw Etna, Stromboli and Vesuvius, 
old residents of the highest standing in their respective communi- 
ties and I commended 'them because they did all of their smoking 
out of doors. If a man on any decent steamer where there are 
ladies — who are supposed not to smoke — or even gentlemen who 



18 DOG FENNEL M THE OEIEXT 

do not smoke will insist upon smoking he ought to go overheard 
o do it and failing to do this of his own free mil and accord, 
ouZ hv m able-bodied posse of stewards, set apart for that pur- 
pose to be put overboard! The pursuit of life, hberty and happi- 
net hnplving the right of locomotion and the right to breathe the 
S£ted air. is the inalienable right of every freeman and no 
Zn Ms he r ght, further than the necessities of his life demand, 
to taint the air 8 that others have to breathe. The man who has an 
runa o dablT foul breath is to be pitied, but if a man with such a 
Wath takes pains to come and blow it in your face you are justly 
too gnaiit^d insulted, and if you are born in old Kentucky ^ome- 
borlv mav hear something drop immediately after that man does 
that but that same man can add to that breath the still worse odor 
of t*nk nfo d pipe, and walk up to you and blow the combination 
i2 your ven- nose and throat and you are expected to swallow 
he insult and the smoke together with an approving ^« 
that the very best cigar is "fire at one end and fool at the other. i 
know personally, whereof I depose; I have been there. I suppose 

they would call it blasphemy. , , 

These Christians have, hundreds of times, answered me by tell- 
ing of men who have drank liquor and used tobacco and yet kved 
to be eighty or ninety years old. I always answer such people by 
ml too them that Methuselah lived 969 years and never used whisky 
of tobacco If infidel philosophy tends no more to ^ moralize men 
Sap Christian philosophy does, to make the change from Christian 
to infidel is a game that is not worth the candle. 

The longer I live and the more I know of men the more firmly 
convinced I am that my father, who died, aged 71 years, was taken 
all a round the highest type of a man that I ever knew and his only 
wife war he kind of a woman that kind of a man is apt to marry 
The onlv thina- that I ever saw in my father that was unworthy of 
IgentleLan and a philosopher was that he chewed tobacco. I never 

iTwaTtite natural, therefore, that in my ^ 
should have begun the use of tobacco, at the age of twenty years, 
tie »so Ural to me that I never had * moment o the or 
dmarv experience of the new beginner who takes his firs t lessons 
to tme wood-shed, if he lives in town, or out behind the stable if he 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OBIENT 



19 



lives in the country. For twenty years then I smoked and chewed 
tobacco, doing both as decently and moderately as it is possible to 
do anythings that are essentially indecent and immoderate and, 
therefore, enjoying to the fullest all that there is in tobacco. At 
that time I concluded to quit, and from that day to his that I am 
now in my 66th year, no crumb of tobacco, in any shape, even by 
accident, has ever gone into my mouth, and while I am ashamed 
that I ever used it I am proud that I had the manhood to quit it. 

Among the relics of George Washington and of Henry Clay, 
I have seen two elegant assortments of snuff boxes, and snuffing was 
once a fad quite as popular as smoking is now. 

The chewing of tobacco and squirting of its extract is now al- 
most obsolete except in low society and among some old men. I 
suppose I saw easily a million people smoking from the time I re- 
cently left New York until I got back there again, but I do not 
remember to have seen a single man chewing tobacco. I saw at 
Cairo and at Nice ladies smoking cigarettes in the parlors of ele- 
gant hotels. It was very disgusting. 

The decadence of snuff and chewing tobacco shows it quite pos- 
sible that, in a few more years, smoking may go the same way. 

I do not, in what I am here saying, expect to influence' more 
than one man out of one hundred of those who may read this, but 
it is for that one man in one hundred that I am working. He will, 
in the majority of instances, be a young man. Old fools are the 
greatest fools. I have recently seenj very literally, that "Kome was 
not built in a clay," but it certainly got there with both feet and 
they call it "the eternal city." I saw the Egyptian literally "cast- 
ing his bread upon the waters" with the hope that after many days 
it would return to him increased many fold. I am willing to do 
the same in what I say about tobacco. " Some of it will fall by the 
wayside and be devoured by the fowls of the air. Some will fall in 
stony places and perish for the want of nourishment, but some will 
fall into good hearts and healthy brains and when I am dead some 
body will honor me because I said what I am now saying. 

I greatly admire Ingersoll and think that, like another Sam- 
son, he was as strong in his death as he was in his life, but I re- 
member, with regret, that the last time I saw him he sat smoking 
the greater part of the time that we talked. 

I do no believe in any kind of a hell, even of the most revised 
and up-to-date style, but if it does pan out that I am mistaken 
about it, I believe that a fearful percentage of those who smoke in 
this life will smoke in the hereafter. 

To finish my deposition under the head of seasickness I state 
as follows: The present Jaffa on the coast of Palestine the sea 



20 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

nort for Jerusalem, or rather the nearest to a sea port that Jerusa- 

,T,i,o tie pl,«U.„ Simon, 0» to*. » J" ">» 

Simon and his tannery have, therefore, 

"Gone glimmering through the dream of things that were, 
\ school boy's tale, the wonder of an hour. ' 

„jt b. .Mo » <»"™' a lt Lrf^j „ d m get mg 

52«gft -&s?6 fiswa s 

of Jaffa, there lay the sea as gentl 7» W**^ sticking up 

srs^riTS-Se^sfstti. ...... «.» . 

asi'MttS- - « 5- * L - ■» - 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE OEIEXT 



21 



of the gang stair that the big ship let down for us, and, without any 
danger, or any trouble, stepped into the small boats and selected 
seats on Turkish rugs that cost $100 here and about $3 there, I 
thought how stupid I had been to believe all the sailor lies about the 
trouble and danger of landing in J affa, and when we had gotten on 
shore over a water that I could have crossed in a Kentucky river 
canoe, I felt mad that it had not occurred to me to pull off my 
shoes and roll up my breeches and wade ashore, the whole three 
miles from the Moltke. 

We went on our way rejoicing to Jerusalem and "looked upon 
the walls of Zion and counted the towers, thereof," as the famous 
old Brother Thomas Dudley of the Hardshell Baptist persuasion, 
told us two or three thousand times we ought to do, the only time 
it ever was my luck to hear his preach. 

All the time then when we had "done" Jerusalem, or rather 
after it had "done" us, and we were getting back to Jaffa, to em- 
bark again, I congratulated myself and everybody around me, about 
one thousand times, that we had such a beautiful quiet day, and 
therefore, as I said, that we would go back to the Moltke just as 
smoothly as we had come out. But when we came in sight' of the 
sea I know my wife would have been alarmed beyond measure if 
she could have seen my horrified face. She has become accustomed 
to me in thirty-eight years that we have been chumming together, 
but her one experience in matrimony seems to have given her a 
dread of any second eligibility in that line. 

For no reason on the earth, or on the sea that I could see, there, 
in that calm, sunny day, was the sea cutting up an assortment of 
didoes that would have deterred Dido herself from getting on it — 
we saw the place where she went over to build Carthage. That sea 
looked like it was as much as any man's life was worth for anybody 
to get on it, and my family I had left in no very easy circumstances 
financially and didn't have any insurance policy on my life. 

Through a long schooling of years I had trained myself to look 
death in the face and I had from various sources, especially from 
irate readers of my newspaper had many and many a close call. I 
had gotten so that I could look down the muzzle of a big pistol that 
some other fellow had by the other end of it, with the same sang 
froid that I could look through an opera glass at a circus, but I 
had not schooled myself thus to contemplate another turn at sea- 
sickness. Not only were wife, home and children beckoning me 
back to America but J erusalem was behind me and I would rather 
have gotten drowned than go back to that town. 

So I was one of about fifty who stepped into one of the ten 
boats, each with its four Arabs as before. We had three miles to 



22 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



row and the sea was so against us that it seemed that we did not 
mL mo than an inch each stroke of the long oars^that bent m 
r onse to their straining of every muscle m their bodies until the 
win ran from under their fezes into their eyes. They sang m 
uniSn with the metric stroke of their oars what seemed to be a 
hvmn from the Koran, in which I thought I frequently heard the 
na me of Allah, upon whom they were calling to help them with 
job, though as oarsmen they perhaps had not their equa s 
in the world such a party as these Cookies were like angel visit, 
!n that ther were f ew and far between, and there the resemblance 

Seem in the meantime the boat we were in was rearing up before arid 
kickiS np behind like a broncho that even Teddy Eoosevelt could 
not ride Things looked awful bad and my stomach was beginning 
fe el xhe same war. I came very near trying to bring a smile 
to the whitened faces of the passengers, by saying to the Arabs. 
"Fear not von carrv Caesar," but the Arabs didn't understand any 
End sh and the classic allusion would have been wasted on hem 
and it seemed too grim for our environment, and mj aw and 
„ we re getting into such a state of collapse that I eonldn t ta k 
FnS 'h e ther or even American. The other nine boats I could 
fee' rnootoa in the waves just as ours was. They would climb 
dear ™ on top of a wave and then plunge down clear out of sight 
S exactly like they had gone to the bottom. Two of them ere 
^ neartv dashed against the rocks that their e,^» ^ 

The one we were in ran away up on top of a wave and tnen 
• 7 T ill like n norooise and it hit the water with such a 
Si at I ££j?«CTT& a rock and thought the water 
wo Id riU in the next second, and it didn't seem that the whole 
flo«lk of life boats on the Moltke and all of her life preservers 
ponld save a sino'le one of us. , , T -,. i 

I tried hard to make myself believe I was not scared but I did 
not have the courage to start "Pull for the 

wanted them to pull from the shore. I was so sick I could hardij 
stand and vet I did not vomit. 

When finally, we got to the foot of the long steps that came 

butlflong as I live I shall never forget that ride, m a small boat, 
from Jaffa to the Moltke. 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



23 



There was a woman in the party six feet high who weighed 
250 pounds. She was always a good friend to me and was an early 
subscriber to my book. She had a name almost as long and big as 
she was. Her dress was so gorgeons that the first time I saw her I 
was forced to remark that "Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed 
like one of these." A New York jeweler, named Weaver, sat next 
me at table. He called that woman Birdie. In allusion to my being 
a preacher he called me "Doctor." My hair and beard are really 
phenomenal, but, all the same I never have them trimmed but once 
a year, and that is at sheep-shearing time. In the meantime I get 
to look something like an advertisement for a hair restorative "after 
using," and I would be valuable as a model to some artist who was 
getting up a picture of Absalom or Samson, men famous for their 
hair. 

Weaver had lived in New York City and had been a patron of 
every variety of show that was on the road. One day Weaver looked 
at me and said, "Doctor, you and Birdie could make money in a 
show." 

Birdie seemed to think there was something sylph like, or 
fairly like, in her proportions, and expected to be handed into and 
out of carriages, boats, and up and down volcanoes and pyramids, 
and over and under and around all kinds of ruins and prone column? 
all dilapidated statuary of heroic proportions, and Egyptian mum- 
mied bulls and crocodiles, and up and down the back of the Sphinx 
and into, and out of, old tombs and catacombs, and up and down 
trees that had been planted by Moses before he left Egypt, and over 
and around miraculous springs that had anciently bursted out of 
the ground for the especial benefit of some Greek, Roman, Jew, 
Christian or Mohammedan, who had influence with the manager of 
the water-works department of the theology in vogue at their re- 
spective times and places, and these springs had continued to run 
clean on to this day long after the parties for whom they were 
called into existence. For instance a spring in Rome that was 
especially made, by Jupiter, for Castor and Pollux to water their 
horses at, when they once came down from heaven to spend a day 
or two doing the town, and if you don't .believe that story you can 
go to Rome, as we did, and they will show you the spring now. 

At none of these places did Birdie ever seem to have any im- 
pression that her avoirdupois and dimensions were aught other than 
those of a fay, or some kind of a liliputian, and it, not infrequently 
fell to my lot to help her. I intimated to her two or three times, 
as delicately as I could, that if she did not get those false concep- 
tions of her size and weight out of her head some clay something 
dreadful would befall her. When she got, therefore, to the foot of 



a4 DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 

Sit E hi. b» . -iF 'h.< h« J. jJW -J 

* Urn™ women after that ride from Jaffa, fefl on the deck of the 

deck without any trouble. 

That same Jaffa seemed, some how to hare it m for me, and it 

far. the most learned : man on ^the , boat H ^ ^£ had fa 

SiTcoS^r^iri „ «he P »« .. 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



25 



university, the president of Virginia University, and I had told 
Professor H. of my appreciation of the compliment, for I have a 
very high regard for the University of Virginia. Prof. H. had, at 
his own suggestion, introduced himself to me and then introduced 
his wife and nice young son to me, and I was exceedingly proud of 
their friendship. They knew some of my intimate friends. An- 
other bond of union between us was that he had published an edi- 
tion of the works of Edgar Allen Poe, in thirteen volumes. I great- 
ly admire, the genius of Poe. Another bond of union between us 
was that they were radical Southerners. Prof. EL and his wife and 
son were sitting together in their deck chairs, on a back deck lower 
than the main one. I was walking with Dr. Gordon W. Lloyd of 
Detroit, back and forth across the deck. We were to come to Joppa 
that day and stories about Jonah and the whale were in order. Dr. 
Lloyd said to me that just before leaving his home he had heard 
a Presbyterian preacher say, in the pulpit, "I do not believe that 
the whale appointed Jonah Secretary of the Interior and then ac- 
cepted his resignation three days afterward." I told Dr. Lloyd 
that I had heard quite a collection of them on Jonah and the whale 
but that that was a new one on me. 

When I got back to where Prof. H. was I told him what Dr. 
Llyod had said to me. 1 Prof. H's. face turned pale with excitement. 
He said to me, "I am as well educated as you are. We have just 
had our breakfast and do not want to be worried with such talk." 

Mrs. H. then added, "If we cut out such stories as that it will 
not be long before others will want to cut other parts of the Bible. 
Poor old Ingersoll did a great deal of harm, but he has repented, 
long ago, in sack-cloth and ashes." 

I said, "Madam, I knew Col. Ingersoll. He loved his family 
and they loved him ; the highest test of a good man." I left them 
but never again ventured into any conversation with either of them. 

There were nineteen preachers on board, not counting myself, 
and including two Catholic priests. The priests did not take any 
stock in me. One of the preachers was one day a little too fly, at 
my expense, and I slammed him down. It mended his manners and 
he was subsequently very civil. All the balance of them were good 
friends to me, and some of them were gentlemen that I liked very 
much. Several of them were scholarly and more of them were not. 
There was only one brilliant man among them. He was a Congre- 
gationalist — Rev. C. W. Marshall, of Cresco, Iowa. He used to be a 
sailor on a British ship on the Atlantic, but threw up his job for a 
commission on "the old ship of Zion ;" the pay. was more and the 
work was less. He had struck it rich and had plenty of money 



26 BOG FEXXEL IX THE OElENT 

and no poor kin and he was a jolly old tar, retired at the age of 

the most beautifnl I ever heard. He was the first t* , sutembe : for 
mv book and wrote the chapter for it. about up the Nile above 
Cairo where I did not go. He was the wittiest off-hand speaker 

° n attractive couple, all around, on the boat were a 

banker and his wife from Long Prairie, Minnesota, both infidels 
The n e rmo attractive all around couple on the boat were a man 
Ind S f om Vorehester, Mass., the wife and her mother tang 
members of the Christian, or Campbellite. church, m the priesthood 

° f "The Jo^ofhtrathat were the best friends to me were Mr. 
L W. Copelin and wife of Toledo, Ohio. He was awhotakcrf 
dealer - would sell one hundred car loads of coal a day. They had 
S to'lmrn and money to burn, and they burnt both. He pegged 
me to let him lend me as much money as I wanted and Ins wife 
said to me. "Nobody will ever know anything about it- 
She was the prettiest married woman on the boat There were 
a hundred* kodaks among the Cookies and thev t». — « 
nicWs Mr Copelin would arrange his wife and me so as to ger 
ct r Vof i'wdh all sorts of ruins and mountains and ships and 
i J ^ and paiaces and cathedrals in the back-ground. < , would 
pose and look our prettiest, but she always beat me. The p ctaes 

reVnect the most remarkable couple I ever saw. Ton would guess 
ha he was thirtv years old and she twenty-one, and that they were 
travelmo- on a bridal tour. He was forty-nine years old and she 
thirtv-two and their oldest child was a daughter twelve years old 
Lveml parties of each sex did me the honor to take snap shots 
of me and Mr. J. Campbell Phillips, who had been an artist for 
Harper and had gotten up one book of character sketches and was 
^getting up another, sketched two pictures of me, one three- 
SSto ami the other profile. Some envious fellows msmuated 
US oV trouble about 



1 liVo rt,P Phillip and his brother and Blmnenthal, all trom 
™w York ttty^nd Lrll Cartwright, of Portland Ind., were 
four fine jolly 'young fellows and were all fine friends to me. We 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIEXT 



27 



sang together and they complimented me highly, but I think it was 
principally in deference to my years. 

There were only two editors on board. Both of us were from 
Kentucky. The other one was H. A. Sommers of the Elizabethtown 
(Ky.) Xews. He was a handsome widower looking for his Xo. two. 
He was next to the best looking editor in the party. Riding across 
a part of the Sahara desert a little donkey fell with him and for 
some time he carried his arm in a sling. He had a good accident 
policy and "the jingle of the guinea helped the wound his honor 
felt." Next time I go to Egypt I am going to take along an acci- 
dent policy and ride a donkey oyer a sand bank. It's a good scheme 
and it don't hurt the donkey. Three dollars will pay any Arab doc- 
tor for a certificate of your dangerous injury. 

I made more people mad than anybody on the boat. I did it by 
talking against religion and against preachers and priests, from 
the Pope down to some of those there on the ship. 

Mr. Ames of St. Louis, a wealthy man who had a $2,250 state 
room was one of those who always called me Colonel, in spite of 
my claim that my chief distinction was that I was the only male 
Kentuckian of mature years who was not a Colonel. He said I was 
the most influential man on the boat. Another man whose name 
I did not know, said to me as we sat waiting in a railway depot at 
Xice that he had told somebody that I was the most companionable 
man on the steamer, and I think somebody else said something to 
the same effect, but I forget what it was. 

If any other man who was on that cruise eyer writes a book 
about it, and tells what he saw and heard as honestly as I am doing 
and am going to do, I will be pretty apt to get my * share of pretty 
hot stuff, but I am going to let him do it ; my job is to talk about 
other people. But I am not afraid of anything that any women on 
that cruise is eyer going to say or write about me. 

There were women on that cruise, infidel and Christian, whose 
•style I did not like a little bit, but everything on the boat that wore 
petticoats was good to me, except one rich Irish Catholic widow, 
who sat next to me, and who was out husband hunting as was the 
-case with two or three dozen rich widows on board. 

That female Patlander did not like me because I was not pious 
and because I ate Roquefort cheese. I only found out her ayersion 
to my cheese one day when she asked me to set it on the opposite 
side of my plate from her. I did so, and instructed the steward 
never to bring me any more of it. Her opposition to my cheese had 
no effect to increase my piety. I think about Limburger cheese 
somewhat as I do about smoking. Xo man ought to eat it unless 
he is willing to go out into a large field and sit on a stump while he 



•28 



DOG FENNEL IN THE (VRIKNT 



eat- it and star there until the wind drives array the smell, but I 
do not think that Roquefort is. or ought -to be. under any social ban. 

In Irish Catholic woman whose seat at table was near mine 
and who was a most devout religionist, told of her gambling at 
Monte Carlo, and said that she came out $18 ahead and said she 
A going back there to gamble again. A very handsome worn n 
who said°she had been an Episcopalian and was nothing now, said 
she wa<= o-oino- to gamble at Monte Carlo and claimed that there 
5L notam in it when I tried to reason with her about it. A young 
man from St. Louis, with whom I had a long talk, and who was the 
e, informed of the young men on the ship, and who seemed to be 
a nice moral man. and who had made eight tours to Europe, was 
a firm believer in the Catholic church, had visited Lourdes and 
said he aw personally that his aunt was cured of rheumatism in- 
stantly bv the miraculous power of the water of that place One 
of I e strongest and most logical reasoners on the ship was a Massa- 
chusetts atheist who took great pleasure m the ^cussrou o £ re- 
Lous matters, who was fair and conservative m his udgment of 
those who disagreed with Mm. and who always counseled me to be 
kmd to hose of our fellow passengers who were severe m their opin- 
ions of me. The most ignorant and least educated man that I 
talked to on the ship was a most ardent infidel apologist. 

There were some infidel women on the boat who talked their 
opitoon'Tust as freelv as any Christians would. They were devoted 
frimdTto me ' One of them, an unmarried girl, was the greatest 
v t on the oat. She was perfectly respectful to me and told me 
i 1 o herl that she had more regard for me t^n or anybody on 
the boat. She had friends among the preachers, and I took aU ^>rte 
of liberties with them and ridiculed some of them about their re 
Ugious opinions, both to their faces, and when they were absent 
She was nerfeetly independent of anybody and did not care * hat 
SSS 2Sa or thought about her. She £ 
men that she did not like utterly regardless ot who the) were, anu 
^statoinents about others seemed to be accurate. She spoke kindly 
o people to their faces and to others when they seemed to be de- 
serving and gave good and sensible reasons wh 3 she liked some ana 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 2$ 

names without any titles to them. She spent a great deal of her 
time reading and writing. She had such a genius for talking slano- 
that some said she was a Vaudeville actress. She was from Canada" 
Her talk and manner were utterly at variance with what you expect 
m any virtuous woman, and there were infidels and Christians who 
said she was not virtuous, but I could never gain any possitive evi- 
dence that she was not pure. I was sometimes very familiar with 
her, sometimes disgusted with her and sometimes did not know how 
to act toward her. She was a study to me and I was very curious to 
rind out about her. 

There was an infidel banker on board who was a spiritualist, 
and who did not like me because I flatly denied his statement that 
he frequently got communications from his dead daughter. I asked 
him it he thought this young woman was a virtuous woman He 
said he did not know and did not care ; that it was none of his busi- 
ness or of my business; that any man was a hypocrite who pro- 
tessed to be any better than she was, in either event, that he was 
going to be kind to her and that any true man would be kind to 
her, and I left that man feeling that he had given me just the kind 
ot a talking that I needed. 

There was another infidel woman, on the boat, about forty-five 
years old She was one of my best friends and in talking to me 
spoke as if her whole heart was filled with the desire to do good for 
the world. She spoke of her husband and her children she had 
iett at home. There was a very rich man who devoutly took part 
m any Episcopal religious service that was upon the boat but of 
whom, the general impression seemed to be that his private morals 
were very loose and yet the action of that woman and that man was 
perfectly disgusting. 

_ There were three Catholic Irishmen, two of whom were my 
friends, and one of whom was my enthusiastic friend and took great 
pleasure m encouraging others to subscribe for this book, as he had 
done. One of them only spoke to me once and that was insultingly 
because I did not believe in religion. All three of them were intel- 
lectually inferior and knew but very little about the Bible but be- 
lieved everything taught by the Catholic church. The one that did 
most to help me with this book was the most superstitious man I 
ever saw. There was nothing in Jerusalem or in Rome too stupid 
tor him to believe if the Catholic church said he must believe it and 
nothing that he would believe if the Catholic church did not say it 
was true. I saw him most devoutly lay two packages of something 
that he had m his pocket in the heel of the track in the solid rock 
that Jesus left on the top of the Mount of Olives when he ascended 
to heaven, and yet he would not take a pretty pebble that I offered 



30 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



knees, as the deyo^tholi^, ^ J ^ and 

that they say are the stairs ^t**£™£ £ aagel) from Jeru- 
wHch stairs were brought, in S r a heT are to this day. 

salem, and by the angel placed m Rome h(m . 
I asked the man, who was a gopd friend to me * hg said 

estly do a thing -/~^tS iu. T t was not necessary, 
he did it 3-^o get to -^^bv just standing and losing 

from which my much esteemed Jnend hd tot ■ 
Roberts of the Lexington Leader has conm t he j ^ 
admirer of ^ 
know me because I was from Boberte to been loval to the 



know me because I was from ™ » beeu . loya i to the 

our civil war. the moun tarns of tl S *te. bad ^ ^ 

government but we, of the B1 ™^^™g to Wolford's cavalry 
the South. The old Major had belon ge dto* olio ^ 
which was ratsed in the mountains of Ke«y^a 
terror to us of the Blue Grass region, as the M > m ^ 



for us. He said he had heard mncn or ug but he held 

and that during the war he went dowu .there to see , 
out the stump of his ^*f'jSX over the little 
treated me." I as su red him that had al =° * he would com e 
mad that we had for those few ^ but that we 
to Lexington now ^j^^^^L heart, and give 
would take him by the lei t hand tl e one ne 

isra^^ ^ - d ~ the 



DOG FEOTEL IN THE ORIEXT 31 

center of which was printed "The Arkansaw Traveler,- and down 
m the corner, was G. A. Viquesney, Little Rock, Arkansas. ' I ex- 
plained to him that the original "Arkansaw Traveler,- Alexander 
Hauikner, was my wife's uncle, that some of his family had visited 
our home and that we knew much about them, and "Old Arkansaw" 
as we soon got to calling him because he was seventy-one years old 
and we could not recollect his name, and I soon became fast friends 
partly because we were both from the South. He was a remarkably 
active man for his age. He was born in France and had come to 
America when young, but he spoke French and English equally 
well, and as we went together a great deal he was a great benefit 
to me for all through our tour we found ten men who could speak 
French to one who could speak English. At Cairo, as soon as we 
would come down from our hotel steps the Arabs would beseech us 
to hire their donkeys to us. I put my hand on Old Arkansaw's 
shoulder to signify that I had already engaged a donkey and they 
understood the joke very quick. • " J 

There was only one man on the boat at whose acquaintance I 
drew the line He was a very devout Episcopalian from Virginia 
He had plenty of money and dressed in fine style. His hair and 
beard were gray and the redness of his nose seemed to be explained 
by his views about liquor drinking. He came and sat down by me 
one day told me that he had heard me advocating Prohibition and 
that with all my boasted liberality I was thus trying to curtail his 
liberties He became so insulting that I had to speak my mind so 
plainly to him that he left. He seemed inclined to create religious 
prejudice against me, and when he found that he could not succeed 
in that, was inclined to be conciliatory again, but I would not trust 
mm and would have nothing to do with him. 

I took considerable pains to study the comparative intelli- 
gence and morals of the people of the North and of the South who 
were with us, but I found nothing at all to warrant the idea that 
in either of these regards, even Boston is at all superior to Lex- 
ington. r 

The large majority of the people on the tour were people of 
culture, and properly blended good humor and dignity in their de- 
meanor, and nearly everybody was pleasant to everybody else 



CHAPTEB II. 



• • mP of the large front halls of the boat 
There was, hanging m one of the large ^ ^ 

a large chart of all the ocean and Ian i h we w ^ 
tou , This was all marked ofi b 3 . fte 1 w 
rude, and each ^Jf * a little flag on it to indicate 

and an officer would ^f ^^re, and on a card below, would 
the point upon the sea at ^"*^a^riled for the last twenty-four 
be Jh-en the number of g S interest each day. The 

hours. This chart was watched wrto g ^ ^ tt g 

~r&-= ~rs»« <« <■» -■■■» « "« 

its name. . , T • .-.l-*, hirthday, while we were, at 

" On the 18th of ^"\^Z^el^ ^m was gayly decor- 
7 o'clock, at a lug dinner m w^J^^ had picture, of the 
ated with flags and flowers and ° oi lum were being made, 

great Kentuckian. and speeches ^logistm am(mg 
and the band was playing "^^ Jbody cheered until it 
them "My Old Kentucky Home JM* j ^ m ^ 

brought tears to my ^eyes ^^"body cheered and cheered 
of the light-house at Madeira .arid eelebration cere- 

in perfectly wild d^^JJJ nislie d to the decks to look 
monies were soon closed and e^erj bOQj i . u ht see med 

a the far away, light-house, ^^Vtwent^fire miles across the 
to wink like some Cyclopeau , eye ava, o» y^ from 
sea. Madeira is two t hous and seven n tQ ^ 
New York and as on that route there ^ ate ful. It 

any change from the monotony of ^ a nd the 

was pretty moon-light and the an ^« a g from Hg 

iea was calm and the great ship * as s to m _ perceive. We 

almost without any motion or sound that we co i 
£ watched the sailors arrange toj^ of fifty 

S^MS SMf A^fi and soon we heard the 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OKIENT 



33 



rattle of the enormous chain, each link of which weighed twenty 
pounds, as it lowered the great anchor down, and down over the 
great iron drum on the steam engine that lowered it, until it gave 
us an idea of the immense depth of the water we were in. As soon 
as we were anchored there was a perfect swarm of beautifully col- 
ord boats with men, women and children in them, all chattering 
Portugese, and the men that came aboard had straw hats on that 
looked strange in contrast with the weather that we had left in 
New York just a week before. 

Many of these pretty boats had flags on them on which was 
the simple word "Cook," and into any one of which we could step 
and be taken ashore and brought back without cost simply by 
showing the ticket with which each of us had been provided, in 
New York, as part of the cost of the tour. Although it was 11 
o'clock by the time any of our party could disembark, there were 
perhaps fifty of them who went ashore that night, and one man lost 
$3,000 and one woman won $75 gambling at the Cassino in the 
town, Funchal, in the harbor of which we had anchored. 

We could see, in the moon-light, the outlines of the town, and 
of the mountains towering up behind it. As late as it was, there 
was one man there ready to engage in one of the leading industries 
of the town, that of diving for money that the people on the ship 
would throw out into the sea where the sea was immensely deep. 
It would seem to be impossible to get such money even in fine day- 
light, but here was a man to show you what he could do by moon- 
light. It was fully thirty feet from where the passengers stood on 
the deck, down to the water. One would toss out a piece of money 
which, with my extraordinarily fine sight, I could not see after it 
left the hand of the party who threw it. Of course the man in the 
boat could not tell on which side, or at which end of his boat it 
would fall and could only tell where it was by seeing it or hearing 
it, hit the water, then, having very little clothing on him he would 
jump from his boat head foremost like a frog and disappear under 
the water, and without missing a single time, would come to the 
top holding the money up between his thumb and finger so that 
we could see it shine in the moon-light. As soon as he could slide 
into his boat and straighten up, somebody would throw another 
piece of money and he would get every piece until finally the peo- 
ple, after an hour or more got tired of looking at him, and, a few at 
a time, went off to bed. 

I was up early next morning and there were about twenty-five 
of those boats there, each having in it two or three boys, and most 
of the boys very small ones, as they had learned, from experience 
that the smaller the. boy the larger the amount of money would 



U DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

be thrown to him. In a little while the whole 416 Cookies were 
on the deck looking over at the boats with the diving boys in them, 
each boy when not under the water, looking np and clamoring in 
PortngeVe for the money to be thrown to him. As fast as one boy 
wonHcome np and show his money somebody would throw another 
We all the time taking pains to throw it so that it wonld not 
fa Hn he boat so that they might get it withont divmg Some- 
time two or three boys wonld dive for the same piece of money 
f rom rival boats and we conld see their heads go together and see 
them " rambling for it, away down in the deep clear _ water ' but 
some one of them would always come to the surface with it held np 

^ "n^one instance was there any marked variation from the 
oeneral rule that I saw. One time a piece of money fell so far m 
front of the how of the boat in which only one divmg boy sat m 
tTstern that I supposed that piece would be lost and the boy 
seemed also to consider it, and did not start for it. When the man 
™e boat saw that the boy did not start, the man walked back to 
Se boy Ted him to the bow and pitched him over-board, and then 
toned his eyes up to the people to watch for more money. The 
S fellow was gone so much longer than usual under the water 
that I Supposed he would drown, and I spotted that man and had 
made au my arrangements to testify against hmi m the police 
court of Funchal, but the little fellow came up with the money 

The divers kept that up for two hours until everybody went to 
breakfit and I l ad seen them dive hundreds of times and had 
never ten anv one of them fail to get the money except when some 
other one got it before him. The people would throw it so as to 
favor the smallest boys and the smallest ones got much the most 
monev TlSt occurs at every ship that stops at W »d those 
nec-Ple grow up to be almost amphibious animals. Those little boys 
had muscles on their arms and chests and legs like prize 
fiXter and the larger they get the faster they have to swim, on 
IS water and under it, to keep the little boys from getting all the 

m ° ne fj'urinD- this diving entertainment we were also looking at the 
town and at the beautiful mountains on the island and at the great 
rocks that came up out of the sea like castles or ight-honses, and 
on several of which there were light-houses. Nearly everybody had 
fin o era gla sses and I had a fine pair that my good old friend 
SLar Buchagnani, of Lexington, had insisted on lending m say- 
ing that he wanted to be able to say that those glasses had looked 

at ^IZtf^TL true of all other towns and houses that 



DOGr FENNEL IN THE OBIENT 



35 



we saw until we got back to New York, namely that none of them 
were built of wood, all were of stone or a kind of cement or concrete 
as hard as stone and all covered with tiles, the roofs slanting like 
ours in America, until we got into the Orient and found the house- 
tops all flat and of solid heavy stone, forming the nicest places in 
the towns to walk and explaining how it was that Peter went up on 
the house-top to pray, that we couldn't fully appreciate in our Sun- 
day school days. 

You know also that the New Testament says "Let him that is 
on the house-top not come down," and that from this text the old 
preacher delivered a sermon against the ladies' fashion of knotting 
their hair up on the tops of their heads, "Top-knot come down/' 

The houses in Funchal were all a beautiful blending of their 
yellow and white bodies with their red roofs, and the mountains 
behind them, to the naked eye, looked like they were all covered 
with green and blue velvet. Through our glasses, though, we could 
see that this velvet was sugar-cane, orange and lemon trees, grape- 
vines, bananas, and a* great variety of other strange fruits and 
ilowers of the most brilliant hues, including everything of the finest 
varieties known to our hot houses in America, and roses and callas 
and japonicas and carnations and tulips, all in a perfection that 
we, of Kentucky, could hardly realize, and all growing out of doors 
just as naturally as Log Fennel grows in the famous political 
country precinct in which I live, and from which the precinct gets 
its name. 

This island is also famous for its lace and for its manufacture 
of all kinds of basket work known to the world, including large 
armed chairs into the backs of which were wrought deftly, in cane 
-and wicker, the letters and figures "Madeira, 1903." These chairs 
were brought out by the boat load and sold for a mere song to the 
Cookies. At our dinner table at 7 o'clock on the Moltke a lady had 
brought by a steward a pretty basket filled with flowers that, in 
Lexington, would have cost $15. She gave six cents for the basket 
and the flowers. 

A stream of exquisitely colored little boats, with Turkish rugs 
over their seats landed the whole 446 of us in a half hour after 
breakfast. 

I heard through the night, when I occasionally waked, a 
strange kind of a noise on the shore, and I soon found what the 
noise was. It was made by the sea rolling miles of pebbles up on 
the shore, as each wave would come in and then the pebbles will roll 
back, by their own gravity as the waves recede. Thousands of tons 
of these pebbles are about two inches long, an inch broad, and a 
half inch thick, and are oval on each end, and all the miles of 



36 DOG FENNEL IN THE OBIENT 

streets and side walks in Eunchal are made by sticking these peb- 

btal their edges into a cement that is made of the material, as 

fine aT flour* thft comes from the wearing of the pebbles for age 

L thp V roU in the ed^e of the sea. The pavement thus made is 

a S as fl nt n fact is flint, and seems to be absolutely mte- 

Snctible The side-walks are not more than four feet wide but 

hef are laid with different colored pebble designs bnt they are so 
the) are aio .v on th(?m when you 

smooth that yon have tobecwe ^ ^ 

fntTlS SXs on all hills, so that neither man nor beast 

is so liable to slip. , „ . 

These pebbles are as smooth as glass and so hard that no fric- 
tion of Son against them wears them in the least, and this fact a> 
?<= ^v +hP vehicles that they have in Ennchal that are different 
fZ Wtog eke in h world. I had known that all carriages 
Ennchal rnn all the time on sled runners though 
tee ne°ver was any snow there, and that they were all drawn by 
oxen but I had supposed they were Ragged, on the sand or on he 
dirt iust bv main force of the oxen; but it is nothing of that sort 
Their carriage bodies are like our open summer carriages and have 
l^ZZra, but instead of having wheels the springs axe ^fas- 
tened to sleigh runners that are shod with iron The streets are 
vlrfuerfediy and evenly made and these sleigh runners go over 
IfioL streets Vith no more friction than they would over the snow 
S our Northern United States. Each carriage carries four person 
and has a man and a bov running on foot as no people m this 
coi trv can run, and as is 'astonishing in the Orient where there are 
Zl i whose daily business it is to rim fast for miles -thout top- 
ping. Each one of these carriages has on its fr0 ^-; he .™g 
bodies being low, so that you step into them easilj from the 
g° \md_a bos containing a strong cloth saturated with a heavy 
The streets are easily kept perfectly clean, therebemg i ^olutei) 
nothine to make any dust or mud. In every two or three miles 
dri4 the boy will get out that saturated cloth and throw it down 
£5 sSing tL carriage so that one runner «M* «™£ 
will slide over it, and then pick it up and throw it so that the otnei 
runner will slid^ over it and thus the runners are kept oiled and 
X rubs off of them goes to oil the streets, and no ram can wash 

lt 0f Tlie cattle that pull these carriages do not have to be shod. 
The ridges teLen tL pebbles keep their feet from sli ppmg and 
do not hurt them. They are not at all like our cat e. Oius are 
bred for their beef qualities and these are bred for their traveling 
qualities just as our Kentucky horses are. The Funchal oxen are a 



DOGr FEXXEL IX THE OBIEXT 



37 



half foot taller than any but our largest cattle, and their bodies are 
sinewy and compact and their legs muscular like our horses. They 
are much more intelligent, naturally, than our oxen, and walk as 
fast as a man can trot, and sometimes when there is rivalry between 
the drivers the oxen trot like our horses, and the men run. They 
are not guided in any way further than to follow the boy who 
runs ahead of them. I never saw any of them beaten by their own- 
ers, and I was glad to see, every where, on our tour, the officers of 
societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and I am sorry 
to say that the only people that I saw who wanted horses whipped 
to make them go faster were the Cookies with whom I was traveling. 
Nearly always through preference, because I could see better and 
because nobody else wanted the seat, I rode up on the box with the 
driver and I frequently caught their whips and would not let them 
use them on the horses, though parties in the carriage were yelling 
at them to go faster. 

Of course I could not talk to these drivers in the Greek, Latin 
Arabic and other outlandish languages that they talked, and I 
always had to have a dispute with them to get up on that front 
seat with them, but they were always satisfied when they understood 
that I really preferred it. 

We landed in the small boats on the end of a long break-water, 
on the top of which was one of the pebbled streets and long rows 
of "bullock sleighs" in waiting. Close by were the remains of an 
ancient building that in the construction of the break-water had 
partly been demolished so that its whole interior could be seen to 
be filled with cells. A guide who spoke good English said to me, 
"That is a place where the Catholics used to imprison people and 
keep them until they died/' The church, in its earlier propagan- 
dism, had some arguments that were hard to beat, and that old 
prison, honey-combed with little graves into which people were put 
while they were alive, to forestall any possibility of their not having 
Christian burial, is now the battered relic of an ancient theological 
argument. 

In the town we found that all frieght was easily transported 
by laying a broad thick plank, with the under edge of its front end 
beveled up so that it would slide over the pebbles and two oxen 
would pull as large a load on that plank over those streets as two 
horses could pull on a fine Kentucky turnpike.. There was run- 
ning down the middle of the town a ravine twenty-five feet deep 
that was neatly and substantially walled on each side by fine stone 
masonry. Down in the bottom of this ravine, or canal, there was 
a stream of pretty, clear, pure water all through which were large 
stones that were smooth by nature, and on these stones there were 



38 DOG FENNEL IX THE OEIEXT 

hundreds of women and men washing their clothes and cleaning 
great big fish or eels. I could not tell which, as they were differ- 
ent from anything I ever saw. There was so much nice water and 
it was so swift that nobody seemed to interfere with anybody else. 
The clothes were soon washed clean and spread out on the clean 
white hot pebbles on the sides of the canal and a few pebbles laid 
on them to keep them from blowing away, and, they would be dry 
in a few minutes. It was the only time I had ever seen poetry 
and romance introduced into the laundry business. The women 
seemed to know nothing of the hardship of the woman m the wash 
tub in America. The street all along, on each side, had, growing 
out of the pebbled pavements large and beautiful trees that looked 
more like our sycamores than any other trees that I know of m 

America. . . . , ., 

The main two attractions of Funchal are the funicular railway 
that goes up onto a mountain that is 1,400 feet high and gives the 
finest view of the country and of its fruits and flowers but I did 
not see it because a trip up it costs $2. The other attraction of the 
town is the Cassino, the gambling place. I did not go into that 
because it cost twenty-five cents, and because I knew it was a small 
affair as compared with Monte Carlo that I was to see to the finest 

advantage. ^ ^ Cookies spen t most of their time in the island 
up that mountain and at the Cassino. I was with two Cookies wan- 
dering around the town and looking at any strange thing we might 
*ee when I came to a large iron gate through which we could look 
into eleo-ant grounds and see a fine large building. As soon as we 
looked through, an old lady who was sitting there came and opened 
the sate for us and assuming that we could not understand each 
other in language, motioned to us to go up to the building. We 
did so and found that it was a combination of hospital and school 
managed by the Catholics. One of the lady managers who could 
speak good English, came to see us and most kindly conducted us 
through everything' and spared no pains in explaining everything 
to us. The writing and drawing of little children was, by far, the 
most remarkable thing of the kind I ever saw. One of . my com- 
panions paid a little fellow handsomely, for his copy book, b } the 
consent of the teacher, to take home with him as a curiosity. 1 
looked out of a window and saw two men cutting into pieces with 
large knives, banana plants that were six inches in diameter, and 
feeding the cows on them. It is the main food of their cows and 
they love it more than anything and thrive on it. 

" In the grounds of that building there were wonderful trees 
some of which were full of flowers, and there were summer houses, 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE OEIEXT 



39 



each of which would be covered by a single rose bush the body of 
which would be about four inches in diameter, and which I supposed 
might be a hundred years old, and on that bush would be one thous- 
and roses, any one of which would sell in Lexington for fifty cents, 
and you could pull as many flowers as you wanted. The town was 
full of shops that sold its famous wine, but I never saw anybody 
drunk, except one chronically drunk, rich young man. that we 
brought along with us on the Moltke, whose mother was traveling 
with him to cure his drunkenness and who regularly drank wine 
with him at the table. 

That mother with that young fellow reminded me of old Mrs. 
Maloney of the Irish Catholic persuasion in Lexington. She had a 
son at the Catholic school that was so inordinately profane that the 
priest came to see Mrs. Maloney about it, and when the priest told 
her she said, "Well, Jasus Christ, where in the divil did that boy 
learn to swear \ 33 

Clear on to the end of our tour there were Cookies who said 
that Funchal was the nicest place they had seen, and I think, my- 
self, that they were the happiest looking people I ever saw, but T 
think we were more impressed by the beauty and pleasure of the 
place because it was the first land we had seen for so long and be- 
cause our appetites for sight seeing were then very sharp. 

On February 14th, Saint Valentine's day, and my first and 
only wedding day — that is, up to date — we were sailing away from 
Madeira, and I spent much of my time thinking about my wife, 
away off across the ocean, and I said to myself that that getting 
married thirty-eight years ago that day was one of the things of my 
life that I would do over again if I had to live life over again. I 
believe that under ordinarily favorable circumstances matrimony 
is a success for men, but I doubt if it is for women. 

Gibralta, the next place we were to see, was 618 miles off and 
Africa was in sight, across the strait, from there, and I spent much 
time wondering how those two places would tally, when I came 
to see them, with what I had imagined about them from the time 
I was a small boy. I had heard in college speeches and in political 
campaign speeches and in editorials about G-ibralta as an emblem of 
strength and impregnability, and I had sung in the hymn book 
about 

"Where Afric^s sunny fountains 
Eoll down the golden sand," 

and in later days had read about "Darkest Africa." 

We got into the harbor at Gibralta Saturday night, and when 
I got up at five o^clock, Sunday morning, and looked out there was 



40 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OBIEXT 



Gibralta, a good deal like I had expected to see it. It sticks up 
out of the water 1.400 feet high. While I was looking at it I saw a 
flash on top of it and then heard the roar of a big cannon as a signal 
to the soldiers. I had expected to see in different parts of the 
rock the port holes from which the cannon in the rock could be 
fired but. with the exception of a half dozen irregularly shaped 
holes that looked like the} 7 might have been natural I saw no places 
from which cannon could be fired and yet there are four thousand 
large cannon hidden there somewhere and I suppose that if the 
combined navies of the world were to attempt to pass that rock into 
the Mediterranean sea, the guns in that great rock could destroy 
them all. There are small trees, probably evergreens, growing in 
the crevices over a great part of the great rock and I suppose they 
are arranged to hide the openings through which the cannon would 
be fired from the two miles of tunnels that are cut high up in the 
rock. The rock seems to be about two miles long and there is a 
pretty town built all along the foot of it. We were landed in the 
town and started out to see it. It was Sunday but that seemed to 
make no difference in the lousiness of the place. From that on until 
we got back there from the Orient we had three Sabbaths each 
week; Friday for the Mohammedans, Saturday for the Jews and 
Sunday for the Christians, and the Cookies, like everybody that we 
saw ever} r where else, compromised by not having any Sabbath. Thai 
was the first place I had seen any Mohammedans on their native 
soil. The first I saw were engaged butchering something thai 
looked like dogs but proved to be the peculiar looking kids of that 
country. Others were engaged in killing and picking chickens. 
Their expertness in this was the most heartless brutality I ever 
saw but was marvelous. One of them would pick up a chicken and 
kill it, and pick the feathers off of it dry, as soon as a Kentucky 
negro, in the days before we had corn shelters, could pick up a year 
of corn and shell it. Their market was open and full of people 
selling and buying the finest of meats, fish, vegetables and fruits. 
I saw here, as I did everywhere else on the tour, cauliflowers that 
were ten iches in diameter and having in them three or four times 
as much as the finest I ever saw in America. I had heard all my 
life about the immense number of monkeys that there were at 
G-ibralta and expected to find them in such numbers as I would find 
Maltese cats at Malta and dogs at Constantinople. I never saw a 
monkey at Gibralta nor a cat of any kind at Malta, but the dogs 
at Constantinople materialized in numbers to compensate for any 
shortage in Gibralta monkeys and Malta cats that I thought the 
Cooks were under contract to show me. 

We walked up through the town or rode in carriages, our party 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



41 



being something large enough to call out the citizens to look at. I 
think it was the largest party that ever took a pleasure excursion to 
the Orient from America. In old times they used to get up little 
pleasure excursions of three or four million people in each to go 
from Europe to see the things that we saw in Palestine, but they 
didn't have the Cooks to manage the tour for them and the Moham- 
medans killed all that did not starve on the way there, so that none 
of those excursions ever had the trouble of coming back again. If 
the Indians in this country had killed all of that picnic party that 
came over here on the Mayflower it would have been much better 
for this country. All religious migrations are as dangerous to the 
public morals as camp-meetings are. 

We saw for the first time at G-ibralta what we saw everywhere 
else through the whole tour, herds of goats to be milked. In America 
the William goat seems to be in the majority, in our little herds of 
our little goats that can be salted down in their ovm horns. All up 
and down both sides of the Mediterranean the female goat is most 
in evidence, those of masculine predilections mostly dying by the 
knife of the butcher in their kidhood. The goats that they milk are 
two or three times as large as our Kentucky goats and their milking 
apparatus is as large as that of an Alclerney cow. 

The goat milkman is always a woman and instead of doing all 
her milking at home and bringing all the milk to market in a 
wagon, she makes each goat carry its own milk to market, and this 
suits the customer too, for he can see that a great part of the milk 
does not come out of the pump as is the case in America. 

The only thing I saw in G-ibralta that looked like religion was 
a gang of three street preachers that looked like stray Salvation 
Army people who had a congregation of about seven people, and 
they were giving out a hymn two lines at a time like the- old fash- 
ioned way in Kentucky, except that it was in some kind of an out- 
landish language. The preachers looked awfully lonesome. I don't 
think the Gibraltan peculiarities of Gibralta extend to its religion. 

We came to a beautiful place where there was a large collection 
of men who had ''sought the bubble reputation at the cannon's 
mouth" and had gotten planted for their pains, and a fine collection 
of monuments with highly -eulogistic things on them had been chis- 
eled on these monuments and I remembered that Solomon had 
said, "A living dog is better than a dead lion." The honors of a 
soldier's life are too much like life insurance; the parties of the 
first part never live to see the returns. We went on and came into 
some beautiful gardens with strange trees and flowers that I had 
never seen before, and statuary and fountains and strange things 
.and some big cannon along at different points. 



42 



DOG FENNEL IX THE OKIEXT 



Tommy Atkins was much in evidence, both in full dress and 
arms and in his dude undress with a collar box tied over his left 
ear with a string and a little stick switching about in his hand, and 
looking jtist about as much like a soldier as "Mr. Merryman" in a 

circus. . . 

I saw the bar-rooms wide open on Sunday and priests baying 

in the shops. 

They told me there that during our Eevolutionary war with 
the English, six hundred soldiers defended Gibralta for two years 
against °45,000 French soldiers. I want to say. in this connection, 
that as a historian in this book. I only engage to tell things just 
as I saw them and heard them, and if anybody does not like it, he,, 
or she. may lump it. or read in connection herewith any other his-, 
torv that may suit their tastes. 

About three thousand people warned me, before I started, not 
to write a book based on the statements of Baedaker's guide books 
and for the satisfaction of all such people I will here say that I 
never read a page of Baedaker in my life. I did not do it on this 
tour, first because I could not spare the money to buy one, secondly, 
because I did not have time to read him and thirdly because I was 
not inclined any way. Eegarding any conflict, therefore, between 
other historians and myself as to the things about which I shall 
herein depose, I will say that that part of the reading public that 
honors me with a perusal of these affidavits must lay the responsi- 
bility wherever they think it belongs, remembering that m history, 
as iii everything else, the biggest liars in the world are those who 
most strenuously assert their own veracity. _ 

Those six hundred soldiers during those two years of seige, 1 
suppose, lived on rock just as I saw camels and scarabs and Arabs 
—I give them in the order of their respectability— living on sand 
in the desert of Sahara. It is good to have plenty of sand m one s 
craw, and whatever may have been true of their first course they 
always had plenty of desert in the wind up. 

I am a candid man. though my candor has, many times, led 
me into trouble and into some places where they very carefully 
locked the doors behind me. and the government of the United 
States and I have not always been entirely congruvial m our views 
of things. But I have this to say : ever since our civil war, which 
ended in 1864, I have never seen anything that inspired m me any 
feelino- of special loyalty to this country except to go and see some 
bodv else's country," and barring a few instances m which I have 
been in Canada. I have never been out of this country except once 
to Europe immediately after our civil war, and then again on my 
late pilgrimage. 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OKIENT 



I will therefore say this to my own government, I have care- 
fully examined Gibralta, and I would not advise our people to 
send some man like Dewey there, and take the place away from the 
English. It would require some outlay of money and several weeks 
of time and would involve some loss of life, and it might be neces- 
sary to dynamite the whole rock, and thus largely destroy its 
interest as a stopping place for Cooks' tours, which already have 
an abundance of ruins in their itineraries. 

I saw, as we came into New York harbor, where the Yankees, 
as a kind of "memento mori" to the balance of the world had 
stuck, up on the shore, a big steel plate about a foot thick, and 
then sailed one of their war ships out into the ocean three or four 
miles and shot out a bull's eye about as big as the head of a Ken- 
tucky whisky barrel and perforated that plate all around that 
hull's eye until it looked like a pepper-box for some great American 
pepper trust, and I have thought that, simply as an advertisement,, 
it might be a good thing for our war ships, which we saw in every 
port in the Mediterranean, to make up a little party, some time, 
and shoot all the top off of Gibralta as they come by, but I simply 
make is as a suggestion to our Secretary of the Navy. 

From Gibraltar it took two trains to carry our party to Grena- 
da to see the Alhambra principally. The trains there are on the 
English plan as is true of all trains except in America where we 
have the right plan. Their railway coaches are for eight people 
each, half of whom have to ride backward. 

I got into one of these coaches with the Prof. Harrison, with 
whom I subsequently had the unpleasantness about a previous un- 
pleasantness between Jonah and the whale, in which the whale got 
Jonah down but could not hold him down — "it's hard to keep a 
good man down" — and had to throw up his job. Prof. Harrison's 
wife and little son and two other ladies and two other men were 
in that coach, and, there and then, was the only time that I was 
mad eough to feel like fighting, any time on the whole tour, but, 
even if I got whipped, I was wrought up to the pitch of scoring 
one for old Kentucky, and I estimated that it alone would make 
me at least one thousand subscribers for this book. I never learned 
the name of either of the two last mentioned men, though I iden- 
tified the meaner of the two, if there can be any difference in rotten 
potatoes, clear on until he left the Moltke at Yillefranche on our 
return tour. Of course I did and said bad things, my full share of 
them, but I do not consider that I owe any apology to the Cookies 
on that cruise for anything, except that I did not smash the pug- 
nose of one of those two fellows with my fist. He was from Chicago 
and was, so I was told, engaged in some kind of a dynamite fac- 



44 DOG FEXXEL IN THE OETEXT 

tory He had a stiff little moustache that stuck out of his lip some- 
thing like a combination of the hairs on the upper lip of a Tom 
cat, and a couple of bunches out of a second-hand blacking brush. 
He said he and his friend were going to smoke in that coach. His 
companion never said anything but only acquiesced in what he of 
the ' blacking-brush moustache said, and the dynamite fiend 
pointed to a big card pasted on the window only that day, which 
said in plain English, "smoker." In a little while, however, some- 
body tore down all those cards because it was next to impossible to 
arrange for smoking privileges for all. I said to the combination 
of dynamite and blacking-brush/ that though I was an old man 
and tobacco smoke made me sick. I waived all my right to ask . him, 
a* a gentleman not to smoke, but that, in the name of all the 
ladies present and of Prof. Harrison, who was a man m delicate 
health, and also easily sickened by tobacco smoke. I protested 
against his smoking in there. I further said to him, I would 
rather see one of mv sons dead than to see him guilty of such ill 
manners as vou are exhibiting here." But he was, morally, a 
regular pachyderm and mv remarks would have had as much effect 
up a rhinoceros and more upon an Upper Nile hippopotamus that 
had had the advantage of some training in a well regulated zoolog- 
ical o-arden. I shall always feel that it was a feather out of my 
cap that I did not whip that fellow, but shall indulge the hope ot 
hearing, some day. that he was blown to the devil by his own 
dvnamite factory. 

TTe all vacated the coach and left him and his chum m full 

possession. T . „ T 

But vou know who it is that "takes care of his own. 1 
struck out to find another coach to ride in, though they all seemed 
to be full, and got into one, where T found a good seat, and became 
acquainted with mv subsequent good friends Mr. and Mrs. Copelm. 
She and I harmonized on theology but he was a little more prudent. 
I had forgotten to get mv lunch basket, one of which was provided 
at the expense of the Cooks, as always, for each of the party but 
Mr and Mrs. Copelm had one each and divided with me and Mrs 
Harrison divided hers with me, and then, at a station, they handed 
me in a nice warm lunch, because I had forgotten my basket, and 
Mrs Copelin spread open her box of fine bonbons, and, peeled 
orano-es and tangerines and mandarins for me and, altogether, 1 
had enough for four men to eat, and a lot more to give to beggars, 
who had heard of the coming of our great company and had come 
for miles to see the trains as they stopped to let us get out a tew 
minutes, and exercise at each station. 

. All alono- the road I found myself the observed of all observers 



DOG .FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



45 



on account of my long and heavy hair and beard, as the people of 
that country seemed never to have seen anything of the kind 
before. Men, women and children, would stop and gaze at me, 
and all of the children and many of the older people would laugh 
and, on this account I attracted even more attention in Grenada. 
Beggars, and especially ehildren beggars, are as thick in Grenada 
as the flies in Egypt, at which latter place the flies have been 
doing business at the same old stand just like they did when Moses 
and the magicians brought them there to worry Pharaoh. 

At Grenada the children swarmed around me to combine beg- 
ging and looking at my hair. I pulled off my steamer cap ;rnd 
exhibited my curls to them and then passed around my cap for 
compensation. I could not speak their language but they saw the 
joke p. d. q. and laughed, but did not pitch in any money. 

My capillary attraction was the means of my getting to see 
more pretty women than any other forty men on the cruise. The 
women would get in groups and stand and gaze square at me. 
When it was a good looking group, as was true in an astonishingly 
large number of cases, I would look at them, but would not bother 
myself about them when they were not pretty. And now I am 
going to be candid, though I have to be ungallant to do so. I saw 
more pretty women on that tour than I had ever seen in all the 
balance of my life up to that time. I will not vouch for the good- 
ness of all of them, especially at Cairo and Monte Carlo, but they 
certainly were pretty. Going from Gibralta to Grenada, though 
it was on Sunday, the fields were full of men and women plowing 
and digging and doing every kind of farm labor, always plowing 
oxen. I saw 1,000,000 acres of olive trees. They look more like 
our big old apple trees than anything else. Almond trees were 
planted all along each side of the railroad, and were full of bloom 
that looked like our peach trees. The plows that we saw were 
like all those we saw in the Orient — a fork of a tree with a long 
slim piece of iron on it and no mould board, and only one handle, 
and the plowman walking along by the side of his plow instead of 
behind it as we do, and yet, strange to say, they did pretty good 
plowing. The plow would have a tongue to it twelve feet long, 
and the yoke was simply a round straight pole, ten feet long with 
two pegs in each end that went down on each side of the necks of 
the oxen. 

The only kind of fence I saw was made of cactus of the ma- 
guey variety. They grow about six feet high and are armed with 
a thorn so long and so sharp on the end of each of the big stiff 
leaves, that no man, or animal as large as a goat could possibly get 
through one. Some of these fences looked like they were a hun- 



46 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

dred vears old. A very common indltetty all along the mountain- 
oS fSrf the roaa to Grenada, which was about half of it, was 
geit/nc cork. The trees grow to be abont two feet in diameter ana 
the Iwk which seemed to come off easily, was taken off in slabs 
about ttrel feet long and fifteen inches wide, the bark being about 
to e nches thick. It was stacked up like cord wood and there 
eTed to be enough to make corks for the whole world. I think 
X bark was taken off entirely around each tree and it seemed that 
the bark would grow back again on, the parts from winch it had 
!e n ken. There were orange trees and lemon trees a 1 as full 
nf fruit a<= they could hang, and many varieties of trees that 1 tiau 
ne4? e n belre and many and beautiful wild flower, I saw 
tweb-e nlows with two oxen each, plowing m one field of four 
a re and m some fields there would be lines of from ten to twenty 
men & up the whole field instead of plowing it. Olive trees 
seemed grov in almost ^ It 

ST 3£. m « 4 - th7— ns'L^eemed to be almost 

"Little Bopeep; 

"Let them alone and they'll all come home, 
With their little bob-tails behind them. 
The tails of sheep from Spain where we first saw them and 

Zi Z ™?to ■» V, data prt ot (h. .11 ol «b«h 

anvth ng like the tail of an American sheep except one variety of 
Z that I saw at Jerusalem that might be said to have three 
tZ Two of ILe tails were great hunks of fat, the two weighing 



DOG- FEXXEL IN THE OEIEXT 4? 

-about five pounds and from the end of them, where they were 
joined at the bottom, there hung something like the sheep's tail 
that we have in America. 

The measurement of exceedingly small spaces of time by the 
shakes of a sheep's tail, that was common among the Kentucky 
negroes, m the ante-bellum times was not practical of these for- 
eign sheep, but the phenomenon known as the "tail wao-oW the 
dog," seemed almost possible of these sheep. 

Traveling through those mountains that were made of mater- 
ial that seemed to be as hard as granite, I saw the effects of run- 
ning water that gave me some conception of the age of the earth 
that did not seem to tally with the Mosaic cosmogony. There was 
.a stream of water that seemed to have worn its way for one thous- 
and feet clown into the solid rock, under such circumstances that 
it seemed to me must have required 100,000 years to do it 
_ About the first half of the distance from Gibralta to Grenada 
is o± this wild mountainous country and I wondered what there 
could have been m it to excite the cupidity of the Mohammedans 
when they came there and captured it and built Grenada and the 
Alhambra, but the latter half of the ride, as we approached Grena- 
da was through country so beautiful and so fertile that it was 
easy to see why they wanted it. 

All through that mountainous part of the country I saw the 
castles 111 Spain," of the proverb that I had heard from my chil- 
hood. I suppose I saw as many as one hundred of them, but thev 
were generally so far off and so high upon the mountains that it 
was hard to see any more of them than that there was a high round 
tower m the middle and a high stone wall all around and that 
they were generally in ruins. 

It was evident why such sites were selected for building these 
■castles. They were to protect their owners from their enemies 
They would find places up on the steep mountains that were inac- 
cessible except by some one narrow passage that was easily defen- 
sible, and all the material for building which was scarcely anything 
but hewn stone, and mortar would be carried up this one path bv 
immense labor, and the castle built on the top, and much labor 
was expended, ever afterward, in bringing food and water and 
fuel from the plains below, to provide for the owner of the castle 
and his family and his retainers. 'It is almost certain that the 
first house built in Jerusalem was a castle of this kind situated 
upon some almost inaccessible hill. 

As we approached Grenada I saw the Sierra Nevada moun- 
tains the first perennially snow covered mountains I had ever seen. 
They were twenty miles off, but the air was so clear and the moun- 



48 DOG FEXXEL IN THE OBIEXT 

tains »o white that through good Brother Buehagnani's fine opera 
Idasses I eonld see these mountains as if they were no more than a 
mile Way. I found that my conception of perenma ly snow cov- 
ered mountains had been quite different from what I now aw 
hem. I had always imagined that there would be snow here and 
there with rocks and trees and barren places a PP ea ™^"^ 
hut here was the mountain chain stretching off to a distance 
greater than I could see. even through the. glasses and for some 
thousand of feet down their sides there was absolutely no hmg 
S except snow upon which no possible foreign substance 
con fi fall J? it looked like it might be from o^.^red^e 
hundred feet deep and that no foot of man or animal could cross 
^ part of those miles and miles of snow without sinking into 
their depths to be lost without any possible recovery. 

Grenada is called the city of fountains, and it is from the 
meltin" of the snows on these mountains that the streams flow 
hat Supply the water for these famous fountains all of which s 
Sfe -tlv clear and pure and almost ice cold. Grenada is a beauti- 
ful citv of 135.000 inhabitants, the town all being m yellow and 
white stone or concrete, the streets being broad and regular and 
fin v mved The residences had large grated iron doors through 
which many very beautiful women, with black eyes and heavy 
d! hSr n and beautiful complexions looked at the Cookies passing 
in otoups, some in Cooks' carriages and some on foot. All men 
and 8 bovs had on cloaks that came down to tor heels and ^wo- 
men wore anything on their heads even on the streets Thereis 
s in Grenada that "Columbus discovered America, hnt Wash- 



SC^vS th^mbTa" and our American YYash 
n!- on Irvin? is known in Grenada almost like we know Colimibu 
in kmerka because it was his book about the Alhaiubra that 
"use^ so many people to go to see it, that Grenada now gets a 
great part of its living from visitors to the Alhambra. 

ilhambra Is really two words and was originally written Al 
HamS meamng, in W The Yellow of he 

Pat Thad read Washington Irving from my 
mired him, and had made up my mmd as to how the Alhambra 
boked but found it on an immensely more extensive scale than 1 
had anticipated. I had had the impression that over the first door 
e^nterino it I would find the famous hand extended toward the key 



BOG FEXXEL-Itf THE ORIEXT 



49 



both of which are cut in the key stone of an arch over a passway 
and of which so much has been said regarding the significance of 
the design, the interpetations being various and many. I had always 
understood it to be that the Saracen builders of the Alhambra 
meant by this to say to the world that its enemies would capture 
that palace and fortress and place of worship, as it is all combined, 
•only when that stone hand would be able to reach further and 
grasp that stone key; and that, to me, still sounds more Saracenic 
than any other interpretation of it that I have heard, though there 
-are others who say it represents the hand of Allah giving^the key 
■of heaven to Mohammed, somewhat like Jesus is represented as 
giving the keys to Peter. At any rate, though I looked carefully 
over many gates and doors in the Alhambra I did not find it, heard 
no guide allude to it, and afterward could find only a few Cookies 
who had seen it. I saw one very large gateway on the key stone of 
-the arch of which was a rude outline of a hand with the front 
finger pointing upward. 

The only thins about the Alhambra, the anticipated beauty of 
which fell below my anticipation, was the fountain in the famous 
"court of lions/ 5 formed by twelve lions standing in a circle with 
their tails inside and heads outside and holding upon the hind part 
of the backs a large marble basin. I have seen very much more 
natural looking lions in a fifty cent circus and even Duchailieu 
does not say that it is the custom of lions, in their wild state, to 
stand, in this manner, and hold large basins up on their tails. 
They are hard looking lions, but we might expect this as they are 
made of alabaster. 

Mr. Saxe would call any one of them 

"as awful a lion 
As you ever set eye on." 

About thirty feet from this fountain is a basin about fifteen 
feet m diamater, from the bottom of which runs an open gutter 
cut m the stone down to the fountain of lions. Over the edge of 
this big basin the necks of the last thirty-six of the Saracen Kino- s 
were stretched by their Christian captors and their heads were cut 
off, the blood running down that gutter and being washed off by 
the fountain. The whole thirty-six died in consequence, and their 
only subsequent efficiency as propagandists of Mohammedanism 
was on the principle that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of 
the church." The greatest misfortune that ever befell Europe was 
the expulsion of Saracens from Spain. The Saracens had m 
Grenada and Cordova a civilization that was equal to the best in 
.London and Paris today, when London and Paris were in a condi- 



50 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

In as arable as ^***S5S 
ftp*o* of ^^^SffiiSa as soon 8 as they 
for they thought the) were going thousand 
died , hut when Charle s Mar t 1 cap ur £ ttae ^ 
of them and baptized . them - p*™* £ t them then and it so 

of the city of Grenada, amV ^ TgL^ST This wall is about 
and its grounds encloses probablj fifty acres 1 ^ ^ 

return and we walked through me gaiu ^ 
carriage road inside of the Amambra gate wa l*em 7^ 
subsequently saw for climbing Mfc ^ e ^ f water rfflming 
constructed of stone and with a clear , ^am 
down each side, and growing 
to ascend it by easy grades There ™£™>™ f ft bei ver y 
- on the ground through which this y gize to the 

tall, about eighteen inches m ^"to P IXo^what resem- 
top, and with no brandies except on ^and ; ^ ^ 

Wl ng our P^J^^SLmtaa, of many various sizes 
and courts and passages m uj« _ square. Among 

and shapes, the largest SS>8 a prominent 

these are elaborate rooms for bathing . ™ ™ everywhere, 
part of much of the ancient ^^g^gw the Alhambra 
I would say, from guessing, ^.^"T?^ the ground floor, 
cover as much as five acres Its main mterest « ™ story and 

only family rooms and bed rooms bemg m the secon y ^ 
the budding having, m any part, not ^more ^ ig the 

m0 st striking feature of the architecture o M^A^ ^ ^ 
large segmental arch s that hold up me p ^ 
building, the bases of the arches ' resxmg i This 
made so small that it is surpnsmg ^* architectura l 
seems to have been intended ^ as on of the str Han ^ 

^^rSe Or^tZS dtn'their slim supports, 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 51 

if this Saracen idea of architecture was not gotten from that 
strange tree. These columns are made of alabaster and are not 
ot more than eight inches in diameter and about ten feet high It 
would seem that some vandal might take a big hammer and create 
immense rum by breaking one of these columns, but their impunity 
seems to have been attributable to the evident fact that nobody 
could break one without being killed under the ruin that would 

The most wonderful feature of the whole building is the irn- 

^IwTf °" eHcat ? tracer 3' ^ everywhere over the inner 
walls of the buildings, almost as fine as the lace of a fine window 
curtain. It is impossible to tell from examination whether these 
walls are of natural stone or of some kind of composition that was 
once soft. This tracery on these walls, if spread out on one surface 
would cover several acres, and there is so much of it that one gets 
the impression that it was made with stamps when the material 

t TJ'trVt' T *T TJ S6emS t0 be -ntradicted X 
the fact that, all the way through this tracery, there is most ex- 
quisitely done, so much from the Koran, that it would seem that 
nearly the whole Koran is printed on those walls, and to make 

ttTl/ 01 ' T 1 / ° f th f W0Uld 11 be aS ^ a labor as' to chisel ?tt 
the walls. Thousands, or millions rather, of the leaves and flowers 
a the ornamentation that completely covers an immense area of 
these walls, are not larger that a ten cent piece, and vet they have 
all been painted m many different bright colors almost as perfectly 
as a piece of hand painted china, and the colors are preserved to 
being ^ W 7 eonceive of an ? of our modern colors 

11M Tlle 1 iIoois had possession of Grenada from A. D 700 to A. D 
14 JO, and began the building of the Alhambra in 1248 The finest 
room m the building, or buildings, was devoted to religion and 

T i m consonanee Mohammedan re- 

1 gion, but the Christians on getting possession of it, exercised 

* h T aSSld ? lt y J md aMt J & such cases and so far remod- 
eled that room for the purposes of Christian worship as to make 
an mcongrouous hotch-potch that is farcical. Over the altar is a 
picture of the Virgin Mary and the first of her seven children 
(see Mat xm: 56 and Mark vi: 3) that would make any enemy of 
\Z Christian religion who had any taste for art, feel like prosecut- 
ing the perpetrator of that picture for libel by caricature' There 

ylZZJ r " ° f a SOene in which ^™ the star 

of Bethlehem from which there are rays supposed to point in the 
direction of Bethlehem. The artist's idea of that star seems to 
have been that it was about four times as big as the moon and he 



59 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

lightning and a sky-rocket. A lllQTn>m , nharles V began the 

to We in to second story open . toupon to veranda. 

which, in heroic proportions, n alal a.tei lie s 

effigies of the two distinguished person, who f t ^sned t ^ 

to the money that enabl ed him t .tad ^re to sarcophagi- 

this elegant monument there is a c jp . . Inch are ^ 

that hold the remains ot the famous couple iwowa 

other,, down into the crypt W oft h» U d ^ ^ 

S^eS^r -en dead fonr 

Cana^e^^ 

of the Spanish persuasmn plunk* g a gu^ and all ^ P fa 
some '^^J*^ l ^C| e rii n «nd and Isabella were 

mJ side pocket, was imthles J r * or e ^™ ^ gum . 
bone and steel B P ™g^ ^tor Wuxuriaat dimentions of 
mers was trying to contract tne subsequently, I came to 

the , U r S of the & f t^rneaded'eompauiou 
unload myselt ot tne oeiou e m like old 

from Canada, the guitar ptoker £ young „ 

£oSr^dl e S: when yon go too the public carry- 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OBIEXT 



53 



ing business take out a license and charge enough to pay for break- 
ages. 

On the 17th day of February we sailed away from Gibralta to 
stop next time at Algiers in Africa, 410 miles away. I spent a 
good part of my time trying to realize that I was on the Mediter- 
ranean sea. One sea looks just as big as any other when you are 
out of sight of land, and the wayes on the Mediterranean were 
just as large as those on the Atlantic. Along much of the run we 
could see the coast of Africa. My impressions of Africa had always 
been that it was all flat and level, but here were long chains of 
mountains. I had from childhood, sung the lines 

"Where Afric's sunny fountains 
Eoll down the golden sand," 

And I had always thought that the "golden sands" meant those of 
the Pactolean variety, and necessarily alluded to the gold in them, 
but I now found that it was because the sands were precisely the 
color of gold, and, though I could not see the "sunny fountains," 
I could tell from the rows of yerdure that ran through the sands 
that they were caused by the "sunny fountains," and I thought 
what a change had come oyer the spirit of my dreams since they 
sang that hymn at my ordination to the ministry. 

From my boyhood when I used to make little ships out of 
shingles and sail them on Elkhorn creek, I had read the beautiful 
story of "Jumbo and Zairie," two little negroes stolen by slave 
ships from Africa, and I had believed that some time I would be 
in Africa and I had pictured to myself the thrilling sensation that 
I would experience when, for the first time, I would step out upon 
the almost uninhabited flat shore of that country, and, in the same 
way, there was along the banks of that same Elkhorn creek a 
place which, in reading the Xew Testament and thinking about it, 
much of which I did, I had always connected with the t story of 
Jesus finding his disciples on the sea of Galilee and the' catching 
of the immense number of fishes, and there was a large sycamore 
tree up on the hill, the last of which only disappeared while I was 
on this tour that I always connected with the story of Zaccheus 
climbing the sycamore tree to see Jesus, and in our garden not far 
from our grave-yard, near a row of raspberry bushes, was, in my 
imagination, the place where Lazarus was raised from the dead, 
and these things had so grown through all the years of my life that 
I never had entirely disassociated them with my reading and hear- 
ing about those places, and now, when the shores of Africa were in 
sight I was trying, for my own entertainment, to keep in my mind 
those early impressions of Africa, just to realize how different they 



54 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

were from the impressions that were now being forced upon me by 
what I was actually seeing before me. I said to myself, All things 
come to those who wait/' if they wait long enough. 

As the event proved I had been m Algiers long enough to walk 
in that city, called "the Paris of Africa," a consideable distance, 
before I thought of my being in Africa, at all. 

Everybody has heard about the beauty of the bay of Naples, 
and "see Naples and die," but I found it no more beautiful than 
fte fairy like'bay and city of Algiers in "darkes t Africa/' the mis- 
ery and destitution and unhappiness of which had so often been 
depicted to me from the pulpit and "the religious press by those 
whose graft it was to raise money to send missionaries there to 
Christianize and civilize those people. The finest preacher m the 
State of Kentucky sent to Algiers to convert the Mohammedans 
in that city would not out half as much ice as any one of thous- 
ands of Mohammedans who might come from Algiers to Lexington 
and declaim against the Christian religion by pointing to the 
Xms and distilleries and big brewery of Lexington, and then 
show us/from our own newspapers, the misery and crime that are 
in our midst from the use of liquor, which no Mohammedan will 
touch, and such a teacher would read to us from their Koran 
how Mohammed warned them against liquor and then read to us, 
from our Bible, that the first miracle of Jesus was to make wine 

The one great eye-sore and heart-sore to the beauty of the 
bay of Algiers, as was true of all the other beautiful bays that we 
saw everywhere, was the great collection of warships that belonged 
to the countries that worship the Prince of Peace and that he there 
watching each other to kill and rob whenever an opportunity pre- 
sents itself. The only thing that keeps the Christian religion from 
bein* ludicrous is the crime and ignorance and outrage of all com- 
mon sense and justice that are practiced m its name. . 

ilgiers is built on the side of a mountain that slopes back 
gradually and it has a population of 180,000. The site of the city 
fs so steep that the streets have to zigzag to get up the mountain 
as I have described at the Alhambra, but there are streets for foot 
passengers only that cross these zigzag streets and go straight up 

^ ^nntdolttiie bay, there is a very singular ami beautiful 
structure a mile or more in length that is built of white stone or 
marble, and that is four hundred feet broad. It forms a zigzag 
airway built up on arches, of which there are some hundreds and 
up this series of inclined plains, which are a beautiful road all 
sorts of vehicles go, while there are nice side-walks on each side ot 
it, and every arch forms a beautiful store room m winch a great 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OKIENT 



55 



variety of things are sold. Most of foot travelers, however, go from 
the quay up into the city on great nights of marble steps, thirty or 
forty feet wide, with various landing places on them where you 
may stop to rest. In the city all of the side-walks are very wide 
and are all under the buildings that are built out high above and 
over them, and are supported by columns of uniform shapes and 
appearance, all along every square, so that people can pass all over 
the main part of the city without being exposed to rain or sun 
except in crossing narrow foot-walk streets that cross these streets 
that go zigzag up the mountain. There are beautiful shops all along 
these .streets all of which have signs in Arabic and in French, 
and which are filled with beautiful things. 

The French have possession of Algiers and the uniforms of 
the French soldiers there, as of soldiers everywhere else that we 
went, form one of the attractive features of the town, but one is 
continually reminded of the useless waste of money that is neces- 
sary to keep up the luxurious and worthless soldiers and priests that 
cumber the earth wherever you go. 

Nearly all of these military costumes of the different coun- 
tries, have in them some feature that seems perfectly inconsistent 
with the calling of soldiers, as the little cap stuck on the left ear 
of the English soldiers, the long cloaks of the Spanish soldiers, and 
the great tufts on the toes of the shoes of the soldiers in Athens 
and Constantinople. In Algiers the peculiar freak in military uni- 
form is in the length of the legs of the pants, that are made of 
blood red fine cloth and six or eight inches longer than the legs 
of the wearers, so that the legs of each pair of French soldier's pants 
all wrinkled up for a foot at the bottom as if they were especially 
intended to catch any and all dust and mud, that might be on the 
move, to the greatest advantage, and until you get to understand 
the status quo, it gives you the general impression that some kind 
of a cataclasm has occurred that broke the suspender buttons off of 
all French soldier's pants and that this part of their wardrobes is 
likely to come entirely off and drop down upon the streets before 
they can get to their quarters and repair the damages. 

I could write a long chapter on "what I know about breeches" 
based on my experience on the Moltke cruise, and varying all the 
way from the breeches of the Mohammedans that I saw in Algiers, 
to the absolute sans culotte Mohammedans that I saw in Egypt. I 
saw, in Algiers, Mohammedans with breeches on, the seats of which 
were so long that they were kicked up by the bare heels of their 
owners as they walked, and a man could, without any difficulty, 
swipe around the seat of his pants and use it to wipe his nose on. 

On this statement, as a historian, I stand pat, and disclaim 



56 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



any purpose of joke, and challenge the world to disprove my state- 
ment by any one of the 446 Cookies who traveled with me on the 
Moltke' The irab is a child of nature and I suppose that the 
Architecture of' the rear elevation of his pants if he wears any 
pants at all. was suggested by the big sheep tails of which I hate 

X ° lA I°am beside my job as the editor of a religious paper, a farmer, 
and I am accustomed to estimating the capacity of gram saefe 
and I think that the seat of a Mohammedan pair of breech^ 
would hold two and a half bushels, and it seems to me fl at they 
could he utilized to carry the family laundry and other domestic 
lieht weights. I am not going to exaggerate and do not really 
gfirt the use of these seats of breeches for the transportation 
of brick and pig iron and things of that kind. I have sees 
in.tan es of gross exaggeration in Mark Twain s "Innocents 
v;..;,, ." and whatever may be my imperfections as a historian 
I am o'oing to avoid that particular rock upon which Mark split 
InTlfrge majority of instances he was right, but, sometimes Mark 
missed the mark, as it were. 

The ■•Mohammedan quarter" in Algiers is, more accurately, 
about half of the city. The Mohammedan women all dress m 
white and their faces are all covered with white veils with a slit 
aero- each one. through which only the eyes of the women can 
be seen and their eves are very handsome. They are not so punc- 
tilious about hiding their feet and ankles. These latter are x- 
ceedinolv shapely and suggest the Shakesperean statement that 
^1 S well that ends well.-' The Christian women in Algiers 
show their faces and adopt the Parisian style of dress 
Cookies, except me. had money galore, and put m most of their 
time bnying things in the elegant bazaars or eating elegant and 
range foods and drinking fine wines in the restaurants which 
w e imi tenselv large and palatial and a single one of which would 
n i ianv cases.' be worth a dozen fine restaurants m Louisvi le or 
Cincinnati I was driven to the necessity of entertaining m; self by 
trlZ around and seeing things. It is said to be a strange 
pi Z mlogical fact that none of our senses so vividly recall niemone 
as 'the sense of smell. I smelled the burning of a horse s hoo that 
suggested Kentucky and turned around a corner to see a black- 
smith shop. Three men were employed in shoeing one horse. In 
Jericho. I afterward saw four big Arabs engaged m putting one 
shoe on a donkey three feet high. In Algiers the horse-shoe was 
almost a solid plate that covered the whole bottom of the horse 
foot" and in Jericho this plate was a solid piece. A large pari of 
the population of Algiers is of the Spanish persuasion. >o Span- 



DO(x FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



57" 



iard, no matter how big the hurry, going for the doctor, house on 
fire, or anything else, is ever ready to do anything until he has- 
wrapped around his waist a red scarf varying from ten to fifteen 
feet according to the bank account of the owner. I was walking 
along upon the top of that arched viaduct behind a Spaniard. One 
end of his red scarf had come loose and was dragging for ten feet 
on the pavement behind him so that I had to skin around no little 
to keep from treading on it. I thought he knew his own business 
and, as I could not talk his lingo, I did nothing to notify him of 
the condition of a part of his wardrobe, especially as the street was- 
perfectly clean and the red scarf was not getting soiled. The fel- 
low was walking along in a kind of abstracted mood and it occurred 
to me that he might be an editor cogitating some enormous lie for 
an editorial in the next issue of his paper. Finally after walking: 
about a quarter of a mile, he discovered the condition of that most 
indispensable piece of his toilet and, without looking around to 
look at the part of it that was dragging on the pavement, proceeded 
to wind it around himself without taking his meditative eyes off 
of the pavement in front of him, as he still walked, and finally, 
when he felt the fringe on the end of it, he tucked the end under 
the balance of it, in some way, and walked on unconscious of the 
incident in his apparel. 

The head blacksmith, in the shop had a very expansive and 
expensive red scarf wrapped a dozen or so times around his waist, 
and then he had one man to hold the horse and another man to 
hold the horse's foot, in a manner that required that the horse 
should bend his leg as I had never, until then, known that any 
horse, even a circus horse, could do, and that Spanish blacksmith, 
instead of crawfishing up to the horse and taking the horse's foot 
between his legs, as a Kentucky blacksmith would do, stood right 
straight up and shod that horse, but at the way he was going at 
it, if they got the same wages per day that a good blacksmith gets 
in Kentucky, I did not see how he could afford to shoe that horse 
all around for less than $13. I got tired and had to leave before 
they got one shoe half on, and I intended to come back, before the 
Moltke sailed next day to see if they had finished that horse. The 
deliberation with which they do things in all that country is in 
striking contrast with the vim and expedition they put into things 
in America. In this country there is more to be done than there 
are people to do it, and everywhere in the -Orient there is less to 
be done than there are people to do it, and so when a man gets 
a job he strings it out as long as possible, as doctors are sometimes 
suspected of doing in America. 

I saw growing along the sides of the streets the first palm 



58 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



tree^ I had ever seen except some diminutive specimens growing 
under glass, as exotics, in some botanical gardens. I had pulled 
out a pretty silver-handled knife that my good old neighbor, Mrs. 
Ietitia P Bobb. had given my daughter and which the latter had 
loaned me for this tour, and I was experimenting upon the bark 
of that tree when I was struck on the shoulder by a hand from 
behind, accompanied by language, in English, that signified that 
I was arrested. It was an experience that I was so accustomed to 
that it did not sire any special uneasiness for the instant, but 1 
was glad on turning around, to see that it was only a Cookie stray- 
ing around like I was. I went into a near by park and saw some 
strange trees that had roots growing in great masses from their 
limbs twelve or fifteen feet up. and that looked like they had 
started out to be banyan trees, and. for some reason known only to 
themselves, finally declined the idea. There were canes thirty feet 
high about four inches in diameter for five or six feet up, that were 
so hard and solid that when I struck on them they sounded like 
china ware. Each joint would hold a half gallon and they could 
be ,o cut as to make cups or urns or bottles at pleasure, showing 
that nature has suggested many things that are regarded as purely 
inventions of men. 

In that park I saw. as in various places we visited the blue 
grass that had come from the Blue Grass region of Kentucky and 
las now onne to almost every place in the world m which it will 
"amfthat is almost anywhere in the world. Truth is stranger 
than fiction. In the first settlement of Kentucky a woman „ as 
hoeing in a little vegitable garden the space for which had been 
3 from the virgin forest. She dug up a lit e tuft of some 
MM and threw it over the fence. It probably fell wrth the : ^ 
side down. Next spring it was growing there and m June it had 
Seted and its seed were scattered around so that it was not east to 
dig it all up. even had there been any desire to do so Horses and 
ows showed their decided preference for it as a food and it kep 
good grazing all the year. From that bunch of grass I saw the 
grass that made a main feature of the beauty «f the parks m Ca no 
mi Monte Carlo. That bunch of grass made the Bine Gra« 
region and the race horses and the corn ana the whisht ami ate 
Democrats and me. and this book, and many other filings of sim- 
ilar import to which the human race is heir, and that .lie com- 
monly understood to have resulted from Eve's eating a green apple. 

I ,aw at \lgiers, for the first time, what I regularly saw fre- 
quently afterward, the Mohammedans coaling ships by carrying 
he coal m baskets on their heads. A Cookie gave me the name 
of a preacher who had told him that he— the preacher- had at- 



DOG FEXXELTN THE OKIEXT 



59 



tempted to effect a revolution in this matter, by inducing these 
heathen to use wheelbarrows instead of baskets ; that he had in- 
duced the heathen to use the wheelbarrows for three days but that^ 
on the fourth day, every fellow of them filled his wheelbarrow with 
coal and then put the wheelbarrow on his head and thus carried 
its contents until he dumped it. I told the Cookie that that was 
prominent as a missionary story when I was a small boy, and that 
his preacher had probably fallen into a fault too common among 
preachers. 

On the fine streets of that city I saw one horse with a two 
wheeled cart that had a body on it thirty feet long, pulling with 
ease six hogsheads of wine and one hogshead was as large as one 
of our Kentucky tobacco hogsheads. But as abundant as wine was 
I saw no Mohammedan drink any of it or of any other kind of 
liquor while I was gone, except one Arab who was wounded by an 
accident and took whisky from a doctor in our party. But the 
elegant leisure of the Mohammedan in Algiers is astounding. I 
saw them crowded together in little rooms in the better parts of 
the city, sitting with their feet tucked under them as no white man 
can do, and drinking coffee and smoking and playing chess and 
backgammon, just as if they had nothing on earth to do but wait 
for Mohammed to take them to heaven. In the Mohammedan 
half of the city they sit out on the streets on mats and thus enter- 
tain themselves. I never saw a single instance in which any of 
them were gambling on their games. The Mohammedan's ability 
to sit with his feet tucked under him seems specially to fit him 
for the calling of the tailor, and accordingly I saw many of them 
working as tailors, an interesting fact being that they always sat in 
windows, like our show windows, right on the street and in the 
•strongest light that they could get. The only physical imper- 
fection that I ever saw in any Turk, outside of Jerusalem, where 
-everybody has all the evils that flesh is heir to, is that he is so near- 
sighted that, in reading the Koran, they always use their long 
noses to keep their places. I did not notice whether or not they 
.also turned the leaves of the Koran with their noses and I do not 
want to make any positive statements about things that I did not 
see. The only instance that women were in any way subjugated 
"by Mohammedan men, that I saw was the following: I passed a 
market in Algiers where there, was such a collection of strange vege- 
tables and strange fruits and strange fishes that I determined to go 
through it as through a free museum. I had years before, been in 
the famous fish market in London, the name of which from the 
language current there, has given its name, Billingsgate, to our 
vocabulary. I had found the London fish market far more orderly 



60 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



than I had anticipated, but I still had the idea that there was some- 
kind of subtle pathology between fish and had language and I had 
had over sixty years of experience that no human being that ever 
was born could tell the straight truth about fish. When, therefore, 
I saw a red hot altercation going on between a man and a woman 
in the fish department of that market. I hastened over to them, to 
catch, as best I could, from a language that I did not understand, 
an item for this book. I repeatedly heard what sounded like Allah, 
or Allez. I could not tell which, so that I could not tell whether 
they were savins cc Bj God/' in Arabic, or "Git out" in French, but 
I easily caught that, in either event, the general trend of the ques- 
tion in issue was the same. The fish, or whatever the thing was that 
formed the basis for the conflict in views was something that looked 
like a conglomeration of snake, eel and catfish. The woman would 
snatch it up and the man would snatch it away from her. Finally 
she squared herself and turned both ends of her tongue loose on 
him at the same time, and no two Tom cats in all Jerusalem ever- 
used anv more profane language toward each other than these two 
Mohammedan Algerians seemed to be doing, the man firing into 
the woman whole broadsides of the hottest shot in his vocabulary 
Finally the woman weakened and threw up the sponge and walked 
away a sadder but wiser woman ; but it taught me that the infidel 
Mohammedan had his heel on the neck of woman, for if that argu- 
ment had happened in Kentucky, a Christian land, that woman, 
would have dropped dead in her tracks before she would have let 
that man have the last word. 

I sauntered alons the streets being surprised among many 
other things, to see hogsheads packed as full, of sardines, as the 
proverb suggests. I was walking along parallel with the shore ot 
the harbor, and getting out of the business part of the town into 
the residence part, and I saw here the prettiest residences that 1 
ever saw. They were five stories high and very large and all white 
and vellow and all made of stone and stucco with the most beauti- 
ful carvings or mouldings all over them, and at every window a 
beautiful balcony held up by Caryatids of the female persuasion 
and all dressed extremely decollete. 

I ^iw that outside of the harbor and breakwaters the sea was 
conducting itself rather violently and I walked to where I could get 
to ^e it in the exercise of its own sweet will, as I am always willing 
to do if 1 can watch it from the shore. I saw two young men amus- 
ing themselves with a dog. The pebbles on the beach were red. 
white and blue, and they had a white one that they would stand up 
on a bluff and throw out on the beach when the wave was out and 
the dog would run down the hill and out on the mass of pebbles- 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



61 



.and sand and find that particular pebble which was about as large 
as a goose egg, catch it up as quickly as possible and then run back 
to the bluff before the wave could catch him and climb the bank 
and deliver it to the young men. I thought it a foolish way for 
young men to spend their time, and then I concluded it was not 
so bad as some others and then one time the dog could not find the 
pebble in time and had to run from the wave and leave the pebble, 
and then I wondered if he could ever find it again, when the salt 
water had run over it, and washed all possible scent from it, and 
the young men got another pebble and threw as near as they could 
to the one that the dog had lost, and the dog brought the second 
pebble back a great many times and I staid to watch if the dog 
would find the first pebble and, sure enough, finally the dog did 
find the first one and came running back with it to the young men, 
evidently proud that he had found it. But, in the meantime, while 
_ my friends at home were supposing I was sight seeing in a foreign 
land I had put in more than an hour watching that dog. But I 
found it a recreation from sight seeing so that when I came across 
a butting match between a big boy Arab and an old ram, I took 
a seat on some kind of ship fixings to watch the boy and the ram. 
There were about a half dozen Arabs watching the performance. 
The ram would stand off about twenty-five feet and look at the 
boy, and would stand still until the boy would put his head down 
in a butting position so that the ram seemed to think he had reason 
to hope he could butt that Arab's brains out, if the Arab had any 
brains. The ram would not start at the boy until it seemed to the 
ram, and to the rest of us, that the boy could not possibly get up 
"before the ram would hit him, and then the ram, with head down, 
would start at the boy in a regular battering ram style and about 
the third jump would be going through the air at the boy. The 
Arab had on a big heavy wooden sandal, and by the time the ram 
-was nearly to him the boy would get his foot up and give the ram 
. a kick in the head that would knock both the boy and the ram about 
ten feet apart, and the ram with a look of astonishment and a selec- 
tion of Arabic profane expletives evidently running through his 
mind, would walk back to what the boys used to call "taw," in play- 
ing marbles, and wait for the boy to fix himself for another trial. I 
• could not talk Arab, and was the only one in the party except the 
ram who could not talk it, but on an evident division of sentiment 
as to the final outcome of the performance, I sided with those who 
"believed that the ram would finally butt that boy's brains out or 
break the boy's neck. I did not feel that the ram was liable to any 
more injury than to have the boy kick one of his horns off. I left 



02 



DOG- FENNEL IX THE OEIEXT 



the two when I was tired of looking at them, no casualty having 
occurred to either. 

I started out to go up that mountain until I got to the top 
of it. and walked about three miles to do so. I found up there 
some cannon about fifteen feet long and apparently weighing^ with 
the wheels upon which they were mounted about ten tons. I was 
surprised that there was nobody there watching those guns, and 
I was thinking that in my college days I would never have stopped 
until one of those guns was rolled down that mountain into the sea, 
if it had been necessary for a hundred boys to work all night every 
night for a week to do it. I pulled out my note-book and was mak- 
ing some remarks about those guns with my pencil, when I had a 
sort of a telepathic feeling that somebody from behind me was 
looking at my note book, and a side glance showed me that there 
was a great big soldier with blood reel breeches on him with legs a 
foot too long, and big musket in his hand, and an expression on his 
face that seemed to be one of wonderment as to what kind of a 
nondescript spy I was that had come there, from some where, to 
write for the enemy an account of the military equipments of that 
place, and the fellow did not seem to have any better feeling for me 
from the fact that I did not understand his language. He looked 
at me and said something that was either Arabic, or some Erench 
that had not appeared in 'Ollendorff s Method/ 5 from which I had 
learned all I knew of that language, except a little that I had had 
to learn or starve and that pertained to getting grub when I had 
once walked across France with a knapsack on my back, soon after 
our civil war— for particulars of which see "Behind the Bars; 
31498," for sale at this office ; price $1. I assumed that that bloody 
looking chap said to me. that if I did not get down that mountain 
the way I came, and do it p. d. q. I would probably witness the 
daylight shine through the middle of my anatomy, and I went, and 
did not stand on the order of my going. 

Then I came to a Mohammedan grave-yard and went into it and 
sat down on a funny kind of a tomb-stone, that looked like a Dutch 
bake oven, very demurely, and said to myself that all of those dead 
fellows enjoyed the advantage of not being afraid .that some fellow 
was going to kill them. I have been a shorthand writer for twenty- 
five years, and can read and write anything in shorthand that the 
manVho invented it ever could. The inscriptions on the Moham- 
medan tombs looked wonderfully like shorthand, so I picked 
out one that was written in gold leaf, and somewhat to steady my 
nerves after the interview with that bloody soldier, I figured out 
one of those Arabic epitaphs so as to get it into English. It was 
as follows : "Eecatues day casion necess Saturday occasion Satur- 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



63 



clay resrection ricnality Saturday resrectionness time neither occa- 
cionality." Then I could not read the other very intelligibly but, 
from what I had read; I got the general impression that the fellow 
calculated upon being resurrected upon Saturday. 

I subsequently saw the hyeroglyphics on the obelisk at Helio- 
polis and concluded that Champollion had read that and others of 
its kind about like I had read the Mohammedan's epitaph. I be- 
lieve that if old Sesostris II could be resurrected now and should 
read the translations of some things he wrote, he would laugh him- 
self to death. 

I went again down town and ran up against the first mosque 
I had ever seen. I did not see anybody around and did not under- 
stand the ceremonies requisite for getting in, so I just started in 
through the first door I found going into the thing. When I got 
in a little distance I came to a court and found my young friend 
Phillips sitting there painting a picture of an Arab boy whom he 
had paid the equivalent of fifty cents to sit as a model for him, 
but I went on into the part of the mosque where the worshiping is 
done, and saw and heard, some Mahommedans saying their prayers 
and others lying around on the rugs on the floor asleep. A Mahom- 
medan has a genius for dropping down and going to sleep, just 
anywhere, and anytime, that is only equaled by a Constantinople 
dog. Whether the dog got into that habit by associating with the 
Mohammedan, or the Mohammedan got it from associating with 
the dog I do not know, but, in Constantinople, it is plain that the 
Mohammedan and the dog get pointers from each other in the 
science of sleeping. 

I had heard, of course, from way back, that you had to take 
your shoes off on entering a mosque, and, as every Mohammedan 
has to worship five times a day I suppose they got into the habit 
of going barefoot, all the year around, so as to be in good shape to 
go to church on short notice. I did not see anybody around except 
those who were praying and those who were asleep and as both 
kinds seemed to be too busy to pay any attention to me, I con- 
cluded to risk keeping my shoes on, and I was walking around and 
taking in the sights and deporting myself quite genteelly, as I 
thought, when a great big fellow, the principal of whose attire was 
his turban and the seat of his breeches, walked up to me and made 
some remark that sounded like he wanted me to put it in italics 
and small caps if I ever printed it. Being in Arabic I stared at 
him about like an average idiot to show him that it was no go. 
Shaking your head, in that country, don't count, as indicating that 
you don't understand, for all the people shake their heads all the 
time. Even "Old Arkansaw" who would talk as quietly and rea- 



m DOG FENNEL IX THE OEIEXT 

^onably as anybody else, when he was talking American, would go 
through all tlie capers of a suple Jack as soon as he got to talking 
French and though a perfectly docile man when he was talking 
^the American language-he did not affect English-would get so 
excited when he turned himself loose on some fellows m French 
that I would stand off a few feet until he got back into the Arkan- 
-saw language, and when "Old Arkansaw" had spoken to a man in 
the American language, and then., tried him in French and both of 
us had talked all" the Italian we could make up from its resem- 
blance to Latin, and -'Old Arkansas" had vainly appealed to me 
lo -ee if I could not do something with the fellow m Greek, and the 
fellow -till did not understand, "Old Arkansaw"would always 
damn the fellow in the Arkansaw language, and tell him he ought 
to go to night school, and leave the fellow with the air of a man 
who felt that he had come across the ocean to swallow an insult 
from an insolent foreigner that he would not take at home 

The big Mohammedan dropped Arabic and then tried on me 
something that sounded like the Portuguese fruit and flower ped- 
dler- in Madeira, and then something that sounded like Alhambra 
Spanish and then he dropped into French, in which I soon caught 
enough of it to get onto the words, "bas les souliers, and m three 
-hakes of a sheep's tail— American sheep— I was getting out ot my 
-hoes as expeditiously as possible. I remembered that once, when 
I wa- younger, I had tried the experiment of keeping on my hat, 
in St Paul's Cathedral in London, and a fellow had come up to 
me and made me take my hat off and I thought I would go that 
Mahommedan one better, and I took my hat off too and started 
on with the straps of my shoes strung over the middle finger of 
mv left hand and with my hat in my right hand, and then the big 
Mohammedan came to me again and made me put my hat on and 
I after found that it is against the religious principles of any 
Mohammedan ever to take his turban or fez off, as long as he lives, 
and I don't think he ever does it after he dies. 

In all the hotels that we saw anywhere m the Orient all the 
waiter- at table and everywhere else were Arab Mohammedan men 
and none of them ever took his fez off. 

So that if you ever go across the Atlantic and into the places 
of worship, remember when you go into a house that has a cross on 
it you must pull off your hat and keep on your shoes and when 
you £0 into a house with a crescent up on top of it, you must 
pull off your shoes and keep on your hat. Eeligious creeds are like 
"tastes f there is "no accounting for" them. 

Some ingenious fellow with a head for statistics and a kodak 
could go oyer the same route that we did, and get up an illustrated 



DOG- .FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



05 



book on the ornamentation and harness of horses, donkeys and 
priests that would make him a fortune. The horse collar and har- 
ness assume a variety of shapes, the one most resembling ours in 
America having the collar and hames turned upside down. At 
Naples and at Nice they have on their harness at the place where 
the saddle goes, a thing made principally of brass that it seemed 
to me would cost twenty-five or fifty dollars, on a horse that was 
pulling a cart that would not sell for more than $3 on Cheapside, 
in Lexington. If I could have brought home one of those things 
and have presented it to a committee of representative Lexington 
harness makers, horsemen and musicians they would have probably 
decided that it was some kind of a harp with bell attachment and 
the strings off, and my Bohemian harpist friend, Barborka, would 
have tried to string it so as to plunk it. At some of these places 
no horse nor donkey had a bit in his mouth, though the Bible says 
"a bit for the horse's mouth and a rod for the back of a fool." In- 
stead of a bit there was a bright piece of metal that curved around 
the horse's face, about two inches above his nose and stuck out about 
eight inches on each side, and the reins were fastened to the ends 
of these protruding pieces. Carts with great wheels six or seven 
feet in diameter, were so balanced that the shafts tended to fly up 
all the time and were only held down by a strong strap under the 
bottom of the horse that almost lifted the horse off the ground 
instead of smashing him down, as we do in this country. In some 
places the legs of donkeys were so artistically trimmed that they 
resembled the black and white mosaics in Pompeii, and suggesting 
that the business end of an Oriental donkey did not have the 
reputation of the American mule, else no man would ever survive 
the intimacy with his hind legs that all of that tonsorial mosiac 
implied. 

But the priest was not to be outdone in tonsorial interest by 
his coadjutor and fellow laborer the donkey. The priest, in 
capillary effect, rung all the changes from a shaven pate and 
shaven face, to long hair tucked up behind like a woman's and 
beards that discounted anything that had ever struck that country • 
until I went among them. Their head rigs varied all the way from 
a brimless skull cap that looked like a bald head, to a hat with a 
brim as big as an umbrella and that had to be hauled in with a 
rope, like a latteen sail, on a Nile boat, so that they could tack 
against the wind. In other instances the priests wore hats like our 
American "stove-pipe" hats except that the crown was knocked 
out and stuck down on the head while the brim of the hat was on 
top. That plan of wearing the hat may have originated in some 



66 DOG FEXXEL IN THE ORIENT 

desire to catch water when it rained in the Orient, a thing that 
does not often occur there. T 
I saw some hearses in Algiers that laid it over anything I 
hare ever seen since Barman's circus was in Lexington when 
Barnum and Jnmho were in their halcyon days. I thought that n 
mvfrknd Col. Will Milward, of Lexington undertaking tame, 
Suld manage to get one of those hearses to Lexington and put >t 
on exhibition. 'there would be hundreds of the leading-. Irish ans- 
ZS of Le-ngton who would pay him each $1 000 m advance 
and then die just for the pleasure of being buried with that 
hearse and I thought, therefore, that it would be well for the 
Sgton Chamberof Commerce to offer Col. Milward a bonus to 

^il^tZ^X^ an overlooked suggestion that those 
French soldiers were having their legs pulled when they were 
measured for their breeches. 

I heard a parrot talking something that I suppose was Arab 
I went up to him and said enquiringly, "Polly want a cracker? 
He looked at me pitvingly-almost with tears m his eyes I 
heard about a square ol what I supposed must be a political 
spee U ome fellow running for Mayor or Congress or something 
of that kind. I heard what I imagined must be spell-binding peals 
of eloquence about tariff, trusts and the Monroe doctrine and was 
del n ed with the prospect of hearing a grand oration m Arabic 
I intended to state in my book how orderly and quiet the people 
"not veiling and cheering and hissing and eat calling an 
whistling and saving "come off" and "go way back and sit ^ down, 
Tm "what are you giving us?" and "crawl off and dm," like two 
or hrle ttnurel of theinwould be saying in Lexington. I turned 
?he bar, corner of one of those zigzag streets and came sudden y 
upon the orator. He was standing up on a large box trying to 
e l at auction, a beautiful, long lace curtain the match to which 
I suppose he had in the seat of his pants, and his only atichence he 
had was five small children that he seemed to have hired to stand 
here to start a crowd. I waited a while hoping a gang of Cookie 
women would come along and help the fellow by buying it, for I 
had seen them buy enormous lots of lace, and heard them spend 
hours in scheming how to beat the custom house officers when they 

g0t There ^Ine'fellow that beat me, but he had to beat a stew- 
pan with a hammer to do it. He was a very nice looking man, just 
E along the street beating on the bottom of a stew pan, or 
SfiHblt looked like some foreign brand o a stew-pan, and 
beTting it with something that looked like a tack hammer m the 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



67 



Arabic language. If I could have asked that man what his graft 
was I would have done so. I hate to go up against anything that 
I can't understand. I had two days to spend in Algiers and I fol- 
lowed that fellow for a mile and a half through the finest part of 
the city, and we passed thousands of people of every kind and 
description and nobody stopped him or seemed to regard that he 
was making more than his legitimate amount of racket, and I 
finally quit him in despair of finding out what his job was and as 
far as I could see and hear him he was still beating on that stew- 
pan with that tack hammer. I thought about that fellow for four 
or five thousand miles, and one day, in Smyrna, I looked into a 
laundry that I was passing and there was a fellow ironing clothes. 
He had all the clothes down on the floor and he had a great big 
stew-pan like that smaller one I had seen that fellow have in 
Algiers, and the fellow in Smyrna had one of his two bare feet in 
that stew pan and had hold of its handle that was about two and 
one-half feet long and he was getting around over those clothes 
like he thought he was at a skating rink and he was slicking them 
out in a style that would have given a pointer to a Chinaman. I 
supposed the pan was hot but if his foot was frying I could not 
smell it. I remembered the fellow that I had followed in Algiers, 
and concluded that if he was not a drummer for a laundrv I would 
have to give it up. 

_ The only two women that I saw that didn't have veils over all 
their faces except their eyes were a couple of toothless old women 
whose faces were not sufficiently beautiful to be dangerous to the 
public morals, and as they chatted to each other I wondered if they 
were talking gum Arabic. 

I saw an old Arab writing and he was so near sighted that he 
had to turn his head sidewise to keep from blotting the ink with 
the end of his nose, but I looked over his shoulder at his writing 
and the whole page was as perfect as a printed page of an Arab 
newspaper. 

I saw all the machinery and workmen of an Arabic newspaper 
in an office twelve feet square and they were doing good work too — 
that is, I suppose they were; I looked over one of the papers and 
I could not find any typographical errors. I think the pressman 
carried his monkey wrenches, oil cans, mallets, shooting-sticks and 
all small articles of that kind in the seat of his breeches. 

It was getting near time for the Moltke to sail and I sauntered 
back toward the quay to go aboard. I fell in with two Cookies. 
In the course of conversation one of them said "God made the 
world and rested, and then he made man and rested and then he 
made woman and neither God nor man have ever rested since 



68 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

then " I asked him if he was a married man and he said he was. 
The other fellow alluded to Kentucky as the place where the corn 
is full of kearnels and the Colonels full of corn." I looked at him 
as if I did not appreciate his allusion. 

Wren I sot on the ship I got into a strange conversation with 
a German who had come over to America, made his barrel of money 
long ago, and was then on his annual trip with his wife and one 
daughter I said to the old fellow that his daughter was a beautiful 
young woman. He said, yes, she was good looking and just as good 
as she looked but he said he had another one at home just as good 
looking as that one that was a devil; that she had married a man 
with a million dollars and that she was so damned mean that she 
would rob her own daddy and mammy of every dollar they had it 

she c I on t ^ ie C ^ ' lQgize t0 the old fellow for his daughter and 
show him how a little good management would sometimes smooth 
over anv little domestic unpleasantness, but the old fellow said he 
had had better opportunities to know about his daughter than 1 
did, and that she was a she devil, and I had to give m rather than 

raise a quarrel with him. n n , mir nf 

The prettiest girl on the steamer was Miss Stella Bomar ot 
Boise Idaho. I told her one day that she looked so much like the 
Sest girl in my neighborhood, at home, Miss Juliet Damger- 
fle d and danced so much like her that I wanted to talk to her but 
I said vou are from the North and you would not like Miss Dam- 
gertield 'because her father was a Confederate M^or under Stone- 
wall Jackson," and the Idaho young woman said Oh, that won t 
hurt her in my estimation; my father was from the South and I 
am a Rebel and Democrat and voted the Democratic ticket last 



year. 



CHAPTEE III. 



Our next sail was 573 miles landing us on February 21st, at 
Valetta in Malta, called in the 'New Testament Melita, where Paul 
was ship-wrecked and had the incident with the snake, the particu- 
lars of which are given in the 27th and 28th chapters of Acts. 1 
was looking out for the Maltese cat but did not find it even in the 
catacombs at Citta Vecchia in the island. This island of Malta is 
the first place to which we came that is alluded to in the Bible 
The stories about snakes and fish in the Bible being difficult of 
acceptance by the unregenerate mind, as is generally true of snake 
and fish stories to this day, the clergy seemed to deem it inexpe- 
dient to spring a Bible snake story on the Cookies, for a starter, 
before they had, by degrees, become accustomed to the contempla- 
tion of Bible stories on the grounds where they are alleged to have 
occurred. 

At the town of Citta Vecchia, to which we went on a railroad, 
and which is ten miles from Valetta, there is a statue of Paul, of 
heroic size, representing him as having trouble with a snake, but 
the sculptor either had never read the Few Testament account of 
that snake, or did not think its proportions as suggested by the 
New Testament were sufficient to make it imposing in statuary, 
and so he seems to have taken the snake with which Laoccoon had 
trouble, as his model, and the snake that the New Testament says 
Paul shook off of his hand into the fire is represented in the statue 
as being about seventeen feet long and he has gotten himself 
wrapped around Paul in very ugly shape. I am not disposed to 
institute any adverse criticism of any snake story where the pro- 
portions of the snake are reasonably limited as in that account in 
the New Testament, and I do not believe that the conclusion of the 
people of that island, in those days, that Paul was "a god" because 
he did not drop dead when the snake bit him, was a logical sequi- 
tur. If that snake had been a copperhead, or rattler, from the 
mountains of Kentucky, the story might have staggered my faith 
in the New Testament record, but I would respectfully suggest to 
Christian missionaries in foreign lands, and to the devout among 
the Knights Templar, to whom Malta is holy ground, or rock, that 
the statue of Paul and the snake at Citta Vecchia is an unwar- 



70 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OBIENT 



ranted handicap of the New Testament record that is calculated to 
make gainsayers among the heathen, and that the proportions of 
that snake on the statue of Paul ought to be curtailed some eight 
or ten feet. 

There are many people talking against the credibility of the 
Bible, any way, and they are looking up the fish and snake stories 
of the Bible, and when the trend of the popular mind seems, at 
best, to be toward incredulity upon these points, it seems to me 
good policy to have all New Testament impressions, from what- 
ever source, as easy as possible of acceptance. 

We went to see the place where Paul was imprisoned there. 
It is a big hole cut in the solid rock that slants downward into 
rather extensive quarters. The apartments are now all ornamented 
with the statuary and pictures and candles in which the Catholic 
church seems to love to luxuriate. 

Near by are the catacombs into which many of us started and 
the complete circuit of which probably half of us, including myself, 
made, but it was too gloomy and suffocating for many, especially 
of the ladies, and they backed out, literally, after sampling a little 
of it. 

The dead had all been taken out. The graves were all cut m 
the solid rock along on each side of the passages. 

Citta Yecchia was founded 700 B. C. There is a church there 
that has a foot of Lazarus in it, and at Borne there is a church with 
a hand of Mary Magdalene in it. The Catholic church has a habit 
of chopping up its saints and distributing them around for revenue 
and propagandism, in various places, and sometimes they do not 
properly keep tally and you can count up entirely too many hands 
and feet to belong to any one saint. 

The guides did not say, or at least I did not hear them say, 
whether the foot of Lazarus at Citta Yecchia is of the Lazarus who 
was a poor man who lived in Jerusalem or of the rich Lazarus who 
lived at Bethany, where Jesus used to visit. In either event it 
involves some theological interest, The story of Dives and Lazarus 
which, in America, seems to be regarded as a parable is, in J erusa- 
lem, understood to be as literally true as any other story of the 
New Testament and we were^ shown the stone upon which Lazarus 
used to sit and the house in which Dives lived, still in good repair. 
That poor Lazarus, according to the New Testament, went to 
heaven, and, from Abraham's bosom, talked to Dives in hell, against 
which latter the only charge seems to have been that he was rich 
and did not give to Jerusalem beggars, and I am afraid that that 
principle will get some of our Cookies into trouble in the sweet by 
and by. 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



71 



If that Lazarus is now in the enjoyment of the full possession 
-of all his parts, and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is 
true, it gets to be interesting to know how one of his feet can now 
be in Citta Yecchia and probably several more of his feet in other 
places, the genuineness of all these feet being vouched for by the 
infallible Catholic church. 

If, on the other hand, the foot in Citta Yecchia is -chat of the 
rich Lazarus that Jesus was accustomed to visit in Bethany, and 
that Jesus raised from the dead, did that Lazarus die the second 
time and have that foot cut off of his corpse, or did he and his 
friends agree to the amputation before his second death, in order 
to leave that foot as a souvenir to the Catholic church ? 

The doctrine of Hebrews ix. 27, seems to indicate that no 
man can die more than once. Some proper adjustment of little 
inconsistencies like this is highly desirable to stop the trend toward 
scepticism that is now becoming so prevalent. 

The railway from Yaletta to Citta Yecchia is beautiful and 
has wonderful masonry on it, and has the most beautiful station 
houses I have ever seen. Each station house is a gem of architec- 
ture and is immaculately clean and around each one are exquisite 
grounds and beautiful flowers in highly artistic beds and on 
frames and walls, and trees for ornament and fruits, those hanging- 
heavy with ripe oranges and lemons, abounding there as they were 
almost everywhere on our cruise. The greater part of the country 
is quite level and though the fields are all about one-third stones 
averaging about the size of a hen egg, they are cultivated with 
comparative ease, and are very productive, grapes being a common 
crop. I saw many cacti of the variety represented on Mexican 
money, that look like thick batter-cakes fastened together at the 
edges. These cacti were ten feet high, with leaves fifteen inches 
long and each leaf weighing probably ten pounds. On the edges 
of these leaves there were, just coming out, some beautiful red 
blooms, that developed into a beautiful red fruit about the size 
and shape of a Kentucky pawpaw which I saw, later, further on in 
markets in the Orient and samples of which I failed to eat. 

Malta is sixty miles around and has a population of 156,000 
natives and 40,000 English soldiers. Of these 40,000 people live 
in Yaletta and twenty-six villages around it. 

Six years ago some snow fell there, the only time it had ever 
been known there. The roofs of the houses, as is nearly always the 
case where there is no snow, are all flat and made of stone, with 
walls around the edges, so that people who come up onto them 
from stairs inside will not fall off. On many of these houses there 
were piles of loose stones the purpose of which I could not And out. 



72 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIENT 



The country is all divided up into fields of an average of an 
acre or two each, and each field has a heavy stone fence around it. 
These fences not only answer the ordinary purpose of fences but 
afford places upon which to pile the stones that are too large to be 
left in the fields— "killing two birds with one stone/' as it were. 
I saw a place where an ancient aqueduct, now disused, had the 
openings of its arches filled up and is now used for a fence. 

The headgear of women in all countries and ages has been 
phenomenal, comparatively but a small part of woman's head cov- 
ering being intended to protect them from heat or from cold. In 
Nice and Naples the native women wore nothing on their heads 
and seemed to experience no inconvenience from it. They had 
splendid hair and good complexions. The women's bonnets, in 
Malta are very singular. They are all a solid black, without any 
ornamentation, and stick out, on the right side of the head fully a 
foot, and do not come out at all on the left side, but stick close 
up to her head, so the woman cannot see anything on the right 
side of her without turning to do so, and can see anything on the 
left side of her without this inconvenience. The bonnet has a 
black skirt of the same material to it, that hangs down to her knees 
all around her. So that a Malta woman with only her bonnet on 
is as near in "Ml dress," strictly speaking, as the average Ameri- 
can belle is at a ball. When the wind is blowing, at all, a Maltese 
woman has to occupy her right hand entirely to keep her bonnet 
on. It looked almost as unreasonable as our American women 
making their dresses so long that they have to occupy one hand 
to hold them up off the ground. 

In entering Malta from the quay, I went through a part of the 
wall around it, and estimated that the wall was ninety feet thick 
and one hundred feet high. This is partly of the natural stone and 
partly of masonry. A beautiful foot walk, twenty feet wide is cut 
out of the solid rock with mallet and chisel, which is all an inclined 
plane leading up into the city, the roof of this walk being a contin- 
uous arch, and its sides resting on columns and arches cut in the 
solid stone. At the end of this walk there is a stairway of ore 
hundred and five steps about fifteen feet each in length, with land- 
ings every twenty steps, the whole zizagging up the hill into the 
main part of the city. 

There was some kind of a pre-lenten carnival going on and 
there were many masoueraders in the streets especially among chil- 
dren. They were using confetti, about which I will tell you when 
we got to Cairo. 

Cookie women bought much lace at Malta. 

When I was waiting at the station of the railway to go to 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



73 



Citta Vecchia, I met a man who was one of our party and who 
proved to be an interesting character. I was attracted to him by 
his general appearance. He said his name was D. Atwater and 
that during the civil war he had been a Federal soldier from Con- 
necticut, and he then lived at Tahiti in the South Seas. He said 
he would not belong to the G. A. R., and he damned the United 
States Government for its Philippine policy. He knew all the 
details about the Confederate .General, John Morgan, being in the 
penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio, and told me that he himself had 
several times been in the penitentiary, so that I saw that I did not 
have any lead pipe cinch on that notoriety. I asked him if he had 
been sent to the penitentiary for anything in connection with mili- 
tary matters and he said not. 

People generally feel some embarrassment in telling what they 
were sent to the penitentiary for, but Atwater seemed not to do so, 
and would have told me except that I had to get aboard the train. 
If, some of these clays, the honest men who have been in peniten- 
tiaries, get justice into their hands, and put into penitentiaries all 
the rascals who were instrumental in sending them there, there 
will have to be a great enlargement of our penitentiaries. 

Maltese women all ride horses astride. Nearly every field 
would have a well in it, and all of the wells were arranged just 
alike. Each well had a stone over it about six feet square, through 
-the center of which was a hole for the pitcher to go through. On 
each side was a stone post and from the top of one of these posts 
to the other was a stone beam over which a rope ran, to draw up 
the stone jug, or pitcher, and by each well was a big stone block 
out of which a kettle-shaped opening was scooped that would hold 
: about ten gallons, and any of these looked as old as the outfit at the 
well, near Bethlehem, out of which the "wise men from the East" 
drank when they were following the star to Bethlehem, the trough 
-there being said to be the same one that the wise men drank out of, 
.and really"] ooking like it might be two or three thousand years old. 

I traveled twenty-five miles in Malta and saw only one cat 
.and that was not a Maltese, and I saw 1,000 miles of stone fence, 
in good snake weather, and never saw a snake, though I saw enough 
"Maltese crosses to make up for the shortage in cats and snakes. 

The Catholic nun beggar was in evidence there, as every where 
'■else that we went. I have heard and read a great deal about beauti- 
ful nuns, but all of that variety died before I was born. 

February 22nd was Sunday, and also Washington's birthday 
«on the ship just like it is in America. At the 7 o'clock dinner 
the dining saloons were elegantly decorated with flags, the menu 
.cards had Washington's picture on them and Washington was 



U DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 

variously clone up in the culinary art and after dinner speeches, 
said manv complimentary things about him. The band played 
national airs of different countries, including our Dixie whicn 
always had its applause, from us from the South especially 

Kev C H Maxson, from Marquette Michigan, preached a 
sermon that had good morals in it, and then explained that all who- 
did not believe his religion would go where there would be no 
trouble about coal strikes and blockades of business by snow and 
blizzards, and made the outlook pretty lurid for a considerable part 

of his audience. . , 

In the evening I heard one male Cookie ask another one, 
"What are we ping to stop in Greece for?" and the other one 
said "Danifmo, unless it's to coal." _ 

On the 23rd of February we landed at Piraeus, the seaport oi 
\thens and ten miles from Athens. I never had been able, to realize 
that there were people living now who could speak Greek, and even 
children that could get over all the intricacies of a Greek verb 
until I actually heard them doing it, and saw Greek written and 
printed everywhere just as our English is. There was a wilderness 
of shipping 'in the bay, and the town was all clean and up-to-date, 
havSfmany very tall and small chimneys for factories There 
were many new buildings and handsome people and pretty moun- 
tains. I tried to see if there was any discernable reason why that 
country should have become so signally famous and concluded that 
the conditions were probably much more favorable to make Greece 
what it was in history than is true of most countries. I had thought 
much of Byron's saving "Tis Greece but living Greece no more, 
and not remembering that that was said in 1829, I was not prepar- 
ed for the immense improvement that had occurred m Greece since 

^Athens is 470 miles from Malta. At Athens we were in the coun- 
trv of Greek Christianity, the religion of Russia, and if religions 
are to be judged by their influences upon the people who embrace 
tnem, the Greek Catholic is the best of all the varieties _o Chris- 
tianity Athens is, in my estimation, the most delightful of all 
the Christian cities in the world. There are no beggars of any 
kind in it-not even nuns begging for the church, as is the case 
in all countries where there are Roman Catholics. 

The people of Athens are the happiest looking people I ever 
saw. Everybody that you see on the streets of either sex is 
eleanlv dressed and a great many of them elegantly dressed, and 
all in the stvles of Paris. Of course this excepts the soldiers. The 
to diers wear knee breeches and white stockings and have a mo s 
peculiar tuft on the toes of their shoes. This tuft is nearly as 



DOG FENNEL IN- THE OEIEXT 



75 



large as the average man's fist and it looks like a soft brush, such 
as might be used to brush velvet. Its appearance is very absurd 
and it looks like it would be exceedingly inconvenient, and seems 
especially inappropriate for any military dress. 

King George and his wife are very democratic in their style 
and go among their citizens and the only thing about the city that 
is out of repair — if we except the ancient ruins — is the royal 
palace. The palace compared with many others that we saw, is- 
quite plain, and some parts of it actually needing repairs and the 
gardens are not kept in real palatial style. 

A number of us gentlemen went to the palace before the hour 
for the gates of the garden to open, and were told by the guard 
that we could not get in until a later hour, but when he noticed that 
we were waiting with no very good place to sit down, he pointed to 
a side gate and, on going there, the guard let us in without any 
one to watch us and we walked around and pulled and ate 
tangerines that seemed to be wasting in abundance on the trees. 
There was a fine band of forty pieces that made elegant music in 
front of the palace. At the proper hour, butlers in very handsome 
uniforms conducted us through the palace. We had lunch at very 
handsome hotels and the carriages were ready to take us around 
to see the famous ruins of Athens. The first place we visited was 
the Stadium. It was built B. C. 130, to celebrate the Olympian 
games. It was all of white marble, with seats for 75,000 people, 
and the barbarians had used the marble to burn and make lime, 
and the whole place is now being repaired in a way that requires 
almost an entirely new building, but exactly the style of the original 
one will be retained. They have been working on it for five years 
and it will take three more to complete it. The cost, up to this 
time, is $600,000, the workmen getting $1.25 a day. The marble 
is brought from the quarry fifteen miles from there, and this 
expense is being borne by private citizens, some of them being 
Americans. 

The Olympic games are conducted there now and in 189G 
some of our Yale college students won prizes there for throwing 
the hammer and throwing the discus. The building is nearly the 
shape of a horseshoe magnet, the area inclosed being abundantlv 
large for chariot races. The building consists of seats the lowest 
of which is only about ten feet from the level of the arena and then 
they slope back each row of seats rising above each other and space 
to walk between each row of seats, but with no roof. A canopy 
of cloth will probably be used to take the place of a roof during 
the times the games are being conducted. Among these seat- are 
some that are specially handsome for the judges and two that are 



76 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIEXT 



much handsomer than any others, to be used only by the King and 
Queen k number of us sat for a few seconds each m these royal 
seats and found them very luxurious. I suppose that these marble 
seats will be covered with cushions during the games. 

There is standing now in the arena a remarkable piece of 
statuary that was exhumed from the ruins of the old building 
entirely uninjured and is now placed in the arena to stand there 
permanently. It seems strange that such a piece ot statuary could 
ever have stood to be viewed by both sexes, at the same time, by 
any civilized people and seems even stranger now. But it was 
intended originally as a lesson to instruct men m preparing them- 
selves for the struggles in the Olympic games and it is retained 
there for its historical interest, as it should be, if not still to teach 
its original lesson. Both sexes of our party walked by this statue 
when they could but see its distinguishing feature, and yet ot 
course none of us ventured to make any remark about it. 1 do 
not believe I ever would have guessed the significance of it as given 
to the men by the guides, and I suppose its alleged significance 
went around among all the women, married and unmarried, 
through men who told their wives what the guide? said it meant. 
Anions the Greeks physical culture was a part of their religion 
because they rightly reasoned that the healthliness of the body had 
much to do with the healthiness of the mind, and while it is true 
that the labor of the mechanics and farmer and of other physical 
callings is more conducive to health than the labor that is expended 
in o-ames it was probably true then, as it is now, that the perverted 
notion of the dignity of labor, such as. in the Bible, represents 
labor as a curse instead of the greatest blessing of man, made the 
rich in those days, avoid useful labor while they were willing to 
undero-o useless labor and the Olympic games were the most avail- 
able means of getting the rich to take strong and hard physical 
exercise The labor of today which is encouraged m our great 
American institutions of learning by gymnasiums and games, it 
put into cultivation of the soil, or working at mechanical pursuits, 
would be verv much more interesting and healthful to the students 
and would be a source of valuable income to their institutions, and 
fit the students for practical usefulness in after life, but to use the 
plainness of Carlisle, the students are fools and the presidents and 
professors and boards that have charge of them are fools also, and 
this -tate of affairs will continue until by degrees, what Thomas 
Paine called "The Age of Season" gets here— a state more devoutly 
to be desired than the millennium that religionists are trying to 

bring about. . . , , 

The lesson of that statue, in the Stadium, is >o important, 



DOG- FENKEL IN THE OEIEXT 



77 



whether correect, or incorrect, that I will say more and say it 
plainly, about it than I would otherwise do. To be plain then it is 
intended to teach, so the guides say, that men in preparing them- 
selves for the Olympic contests should refrain from sexual indul- 
gence. I think that the most competent thought of this age says 
that, in this matter, as in all other natural and necessary 
appetites, not total abstinence, but moderate indulgence is that 
which is most conducive to health of mind and body. 

I believe that the interpretation put upon this statue, by the 
Greek guides is the true one, because they, more perfectly than 
others, have the traditions of their ancestry and have many other 
sources, like this, from which to deduce the ideas of ancient Greece 
and they appreciate, even fuller than the most intelligent of us 
can do, that no Greek in the halycon days of Greek supremacy, 
could ever have been guilty of putting that statue there as a mere 
piece of obscenity as it might be construed by such common men 
as Anthony Comstock and his ignorant minions that wear the 
ermine in the Ignited States and have control of the mail of our 
government. 

Certainly there is not in that statue any thing that appeals to 
the licentious in man, though it was made in an age when the 
Greeks, in painting and in sculpture, could and did put into both 
of those arts such depictions of sexual love as almost breathed and 
warmed with nature, as I saw in a painting of the story of G-alitea 
in one of the galleries of Athens. 

That statue that would not be allowed to be exposed in any 
public place in America was put where it is for a moral purpose 
and literally makes its argument so that "he who runs may read," 
and yet American fools and pseudo-moralists, who would crack it 
into stone with which to pave our streets, will fill American gal- 
leries with paintings and statuary that have no other import or 
purpose than an appeal to the sexual passions of both sexes, 
married and unmarried, who may visit them, without the criticism 
of church or state. The great cathedrals of Europe have pictures 
of .Mary Magdalene the patron saint of the calling that wears her 
name to this day, she being the most intimate friend of Jesus, and 
these pictures of that woman are the most lascivious imaginable. 

That statue in the Stadium if of a man and woman, life size, 
standing back to back against each other and merging into a square 
pillar such as the pillars that have on them the head and bust of 
Mercury and were used, anciently, by the Greeks to mark the 
boundaries of their lands, but some of the details I am not willing 
to give in this book, that is intended for miscellaneous reading. 



78 



DOC FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



Cookie women kodaked almost everything they saw, but they drew 
the line at that statue. 

A most important — probably the most important — thing now 
for American naturalists and scientists to do is to repress the 
unscientific fools and religious bigots and hypocritical and licentious 
judges that have charge of the information on sexual affairs who 
are keeping secret the most important matters regarding the laws 
of health, in their ignorance and stupidity, regarding "obscene 
literature," and to put in the places of all such people, scientists 
.and moralists and specialists in this department, who will, sup- 
ported and encouraged by this government, give to the people, 
at nominal rates of cost, or free, as our agricultural reports are 
given, the proper information on this important question. 

As it is now, this valuable information is withheld from the 
people "by the same people who are spending millions of dollars to 
spread before the youth of the land, backed by the government, the 
Bible that in the Old and the New Testaments, makes a heroine of 
a professional bawd like Eahab, and makes of old rakes like David 
.and Solomon ideals of the kind of men that God loved and that 
presents Paul, a bachelor, as the proper party to teach men how 
to manage their wives and children. 

I regard that statue in the Stadium in Athens as the most 
important piece of statuary in Europe— not that I suppose its 
lesson as understood bv modern Athenians, is necessarilv the right 
■one, but that it shows a willingness of the finest people known to 
history to publicly instruct upon a subject that is only impure to 
those who are impure and of whom I quote, "Unto the pure all 
-things are pure, but unto them who are defiled and unbelieving is 
nothing pure," the whole otherwise good sense of the passage being 
married by putting "unbelief" a mere intellectual quality, or phe- 
nomenon in the same category with defilement in morals, and hence 
we have societv full of moral lepers who assume to lead the people 
because they vaunt themselves upon the orthodoxy of what they be- 
lieve. 

We went from the Stadium to visit the temple of Jupiter. 
'This was completed 530 B. C. and it took 600 years to build it. 
'The people who built the temple of Jupiter stand to this day 
unequaled in intellect by any race of men who have ever lived, and 
there were among them specimens of moral heroism, that have never 
had their moral equals to this day. When Paul preached Chris- 
tianity among them it is said that it was "unto the Creeks 
foolishness" (1. Cor. i.23) and yet the Christian religion prevails 
in Athens at this day. Had you said to the builders of the temple 
.of Jupiter that some day it would be all in ruins and that Christian 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



79 



-churches would be built all around it, you would have been called 
:a fool for your pains. If you say to the Christian of this day that 
in ,2,500 years from now, Macauley's "gentleman from New 
.Zealand will sit upon the broken arch of London bridge to sketch 
the ruins of St. Paul/' or that St. Peter's at Eome will be so mixed 
up with the ruins now in Rome that only the expert can tell one 
from the other, you will be called a fool for your pains, by every 
Catholic in the world, while every Protestant in the world will 
believe it, either intelligently because history repeats itself, or 
because "the wish is father to the thought." 

The .temple of Jupiter originally had 95 columns; it has now 
only 15, one having fallen, sixteen years ago in an earthquake; the 
fallen column lying right where it fell, giving you a better idea of 
their proportions than the standing ones. These columns are sixty 
feet high and six feet in diameter at the base, sloping to about five 
at the top, and are all fluted by grooves about six inches wide and 
four inches deep, the grooves running from one end to the other, 
leaving a space of about two inches between them and being 
adapted to the slope of the columns. These columns are all of 
-white marble, but they are stained brown from the weather, except 
in protected parts of them that are still perfectly white. These 
columns are made of blocks about five feet long which are so per- 
fectly fitted together that the columns appear to be monoliths. 
'These pieces are fastened together by iron bolts that are fastened 
in each piece so as to fit tight into corresponding holes in the 
block above it. Running all along, from the top of one of these 
columns to another, are stones which seem to be about twenty by 
five, by five or six feet. These longitudinal stones have on them 
much handsome carving. Some of them are solid and in good 
state of preservation and some that are still up on the columns are 
so badly broken that they seem liable to fall at any time. I suppose 
that, unless those columns are destroyed by war or earthquake, 
•some of them will be standing 1000 years from now. Oriental 
stones and marbles in Oriental climates do not seem to disintegate 
anything like they do in our American climate. They are "not 
subjected to the freezes and thaws that our masonry has to 
undergo.. From memory I would say that the temple of Jupiter 
was about 250 by 125 feet. Its only floor is about eight feet above 
the common level of the ground around it and the building is in 
.a valley. 

In looking at those ruins the thought that impressed me as 
in all ancient structures, finding their climax in the Sphinx and 
pyramids, was their dramatic silence regarding the nations and 
peoples and kingdoms and histories that they have seen rise and 



80 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

fall Ther set us a good example ; they are not tattlers; don't tell 
tales ont of school; "there is no speech nor language then voice 
k not heard." Ther will be the silent witnesses of tiling yet to 
Lie a wonderful as those they have witnessed, and yet, if I knew 
ttSe things, it would not he safe for me to print them. I would 
again b "a C prisoner for blaspheming and for publishing "obscene 

liter Xot e far from the temple of Jupiter upon a hill in the direc- 
tion of the city is a beautiful garden through which the gmdes 
carried us In working in this garden, only six years ago, some 
one d covered about four feet down the mosaic floors and- other 
narts of costly bath rooms that had been built there by the 
Romans when they bad possession of that country Bathrooms 
fCeZ m many other places in the Orient seem to have been 
p aces upon which" there was no limit in lavishing expense and 
he baTh rooms have many features that won d be strange on, 
y^h none of the salient features of an elegant bath room of hi 
Tx They seem to have bathed to get warm and bathed to get cool 
and seem to have arranged to spend hours in the hath during some 

^^•Tl^fb'ath'roo^noors m that garden have all been cleaned 
off and Warded with a brick wall to keep the dirt from getting 
n-tCTgSn but when we walked over them they were as firm 
as any pavements to be found any where now. In that garden 
k one of the most beautiful and interesting monuments of the 
°lT Tt it I think only five or six years old, and is of marble 
Twtite as snow Tit represents Byron "saving a Greek woman 
^nd W I the guide said, but I thought, it was saving a 
Greek from a sLge. It was, of course, recognitxon oi 

Bvron's giving his life for Greece, but, really,, I did not. rauy 
S^reciate the meaning of the naked "savage" m the group. 

The face of Byron— it is all a little more than life size-is 
a perfect portrait of Mm, and, therefore, perfectly handsome 
TheTcSptor has not followed the Cromwellian junction "paint 
the wart " and Bvron is not represented with a club foot both of 
Ms feet being plainly represented as perfect. The Enghsh govern- 
SoS allow Byron, the greatest poet that evented to 
be buried in Westminster Abbey because he was an infidel. His 
oivinc- his life for Greece doubtless seemed chimerical to the soions 
of his day, but to see Athens now shows that Byron was practical 
as well as poetic. I heard with gratified surprise that that monu- 
ment had been built by Americans who went to Athens to attend 
the Olympic games. . 

We saw in many places very curious instances of funeral 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OKIENT 81 

processions and wedding processions. I noted a funeral procession 
in Athens A young woman had died, and her face, even in death 
was very beautiful and placid. She was carried on the shoulders 
<oi men in a coffin on a litter. The coffin had no top on it and the 
body was so raised that the face could be distinctly seen. A man 
led the procession with the coffin lid carried erect in his hands, the 
top part up, and the whole lid was a mass of elegant flowers ' A 
choir of about fifty persons all dressed in white long robes followpd 
the bier, singing, and then there was a long procession of priests 
..and a long procession of empty carriages that followed the walking 
procession. & 

Funeral processions and wedding processions in the Orient 
-seem to be alike gala occasions, except that the funeral is rather the 
merrier of the two. The young dead woman, in Athens, was fol- 
owed by an empty hearse. In Cairo the bride being taken in a 
long procession to the house of her husband to be married was 
completely hidden in a thing like a hearse, that was covered all 
• over with a gayly decorated kind of a pall. It looks like the 
Orient entertains the idea that is growing in America that it is a 
much more serious thing for a young woman to get married than 
to die. 

I asked the guide if he knew about the house at which Byron's 
_ Maid of Athens" lived and he said the house was now so demol- 
ished that it was not worth going to see. I thought the answer 
based on the demolition argument applied also to the temple of 
Jupiter and the Areopagus, but none of the Cookies expressed any 
desire to see it and I did not insist upon it. If it had been the 
home of Jezebel or Bahab or Bathsheba or of Lot's daughters the 
clergy m our party would have just tumbled over each other to 
get to see it. 

I took two trips up to the Acropolis, one in the carriages with 
the party and one on foot alone. The trip that I took alone is 
much more vivid- m my memory. The main thing that I can 
remember when I was with the party is having Mr. Copelin to 
stand his pretty wife and me up in front of some big columns to 
take our picture with a kodak. 

The Acropolis, with the Parthenon, Temple of Victory and 
Erectheum, are all together up on a high hill that is almost solid 
stone, but the modern road leading up to this is a verv fine one. 
with a fairly easy grade for walking. I suppose I walked a mile 
up that hill, on the carriage road, and then came to a point where 
I had to go up a much steeper foot-path for what would have 
measured, perpendicularly, a hundred feet or more. This path 
lay over the solid stone as it naturally belonged to the hill and 



82 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OBIENT 



, - rll wa „ w0rn smooth by the human feet which, for centuries, 
KiXdXt hill. All along on the side of .that 

SS^thStrnX ™om for the finer hidings that now 
a +»r>fl there in a less advanced stage of rum. 

^ I do nofknow the name of the building that forms a gateway 
through which all have to pass in going mto the ground* of the 
Acropolis. The comparatively level place on the top oi « e hi 

1116 «Z PanlXt Sb^ST™ broad . It has now 
standing fortv-nvo columns that are thirty-five feet, high an d « 
flct iu diameter at the base and nearly all of the original entabla- 
SSS- one column to another. These columns . are m 
tuie leacin f ^ waU lg 5tandin g 

t L norlh that is all the way around the building.- >o 

rocks that are now fitted together as they originally were. 

The Parthenon was built 438 B. C. About 170 years ago 
Lbarded £gJ&? £ 

&^S3J?-S3fi-* five feet square and is almost 

Perf ^e Erectheum. on the Aeropotis. was «^-^ 
nf wliioh i* held up bv six women, each about ^even teex nigu, y 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE OKIEOT 83 

of workmen being employed and the time given them to clo their 
work seems to be practically unlimited. The modern scaffolding 
that they are nsmg seems to be quite old and it seems that it is 
considered that this repairing shall be perpetual just as the flight of 
time and other accidents bring damage to the building. These 
workmen are putting back into the building all stones and parts 
of columns that have fallen out, as far as these parts can be iden- 
tified and recovered; even when, in some instances one of these 
parts can only be restored by very perfectly cementing together 
as we would a fine piece of china, various fragments of one of these 
pieces. In the new marbles that they have had to insert while 
the general outline of the piece as it originally evidently was has 
been perfectly preserved the inserted piece has not on it the minute 
and beautiful detail of sculpture that is there to be seen upon the 
blocks that match it. 

Whether these inserted pieces are intended to be left plain to 
show in coming centuries that they are restorations or it is con- 
templated at some time to complete them in the building, I do not 
know and possibly this point is not yet decided by those in charge 
of the restorations. It seems to me, though, that the value of their 
history would be most subserved by allowing all the restored parts 
to appear as far as possible, as restorations. 

One of the six women that hold up the roof of the famous 
porch is almost entirely a restoration. It is absolutely a perfect 
model of the others, as they originally were, the nose," which, of 
course, is Grecian, being restored and the arms restored in the 
positions that the remains of the broken arms of the others would 
indicate that they originally were. The six women are all alike. 
Made of the stern stuff that they are their lot has been a hard one 
but the drapery of their clothing indicates that they are entirely 
proper women. J y 

In walking around those buildings I would stand or sit in 
places where I imagined such men as Socrates, Solon, Thales and 
the others of the "seven wise men of Greece" stood or sat and 
looked out upon the beautiful sea, and islands and mountains as 
they cogitated the thoughts which have come down to us through 
the ringing grooves of time, and which todav as much as, or more 
than ever are commending themselves by their accuracy to the 
nnest thinkers in the world. 

• » W tt a f 3 n b °oi y Saj n ° W that 0f a11 the ei ^J minions of people 
m tne United States there is a single man or woman who in 2300 
years from now will be known by name and whose sayings will then 
be quoted familiarly among the people? 

In 2300 years from now history will be giving uncertain 



84 



DOG FENNEL IX THE OEIEXT 



glimpses of the life of a man whose name was George Booker 
Washington who discovered America. 

Over across a valley, about a half mile from the Acropolis, is 
Alars Hill, where Paul is said to have preached. It js simply a 
round smooth Mil. not so high as the Acropolis, and probably at 
that dav. as now. had no trees on it, partly because it never was a 
place that could have produced many or large trees, because there 
was not much soil on it and partly because any land so near a 
We city as that is would have been denuded of its trees had 
there been any, many years before the beginning oi the Christian 
era Alars Hill looks like such a place as might have been selected 
by Paul and his handful of followers to preach his new doctrine 
It is as near to the city as yon can find a place where they would 
have been far enough out of the crowd for Paul and his hearers 
to have respectively spoken and heard without interruption from 
accidental passers-a place where it could be seen what they were 
doing and vet one to which one would not be liable to take the 
necessary pains to go unless he was interested to hear the speech 

I believe that there was such a man as Paul and that he 
probably preached on Mars Hill, and that the story of his ship- 
Wreck and stay at Melita, as given in the New Testament is sub- 
stantially true, but that unreasonable stories were added to t ie 
facts in 'hi- life, some by honest accident and some, probably the 
greatest part, by those who wanted to make money out of the new 
religion, as always has been and still is. true of all religions. The 
Jupiter of the Greeks, also called Jove, was the God of heaven and 
ofTlmost the same name the Jehovah, the God of the Jewish and 
Christian religions. Venus, known to the Greeks as Aphrodite, had 
by the god Mercnry, a child named Cupid that was the god of 
love and Mary in the Christian religion, had by God or by a 
supernatural spirit, a child named Jesus that was the god of love 
The kinds of love may have differed, but one blended into the other 
and the similarity between Tenus and Cupid on one hand and Mary 
and Jesus on the other hand, was such that the pictures of A enus 
the Greek or Eoman woman, were used by the painters of the 
Christian relmion as models for Mary the mother of Jesus. J he 
idea of the cohabitation of gods and women resulting m progeny 
that was nearly always, if not always, masculine, was a familiar one 
to all the educated people of Greece, and therefore the religion of 
Paul was "foolishness to them," and his followers oi the Christian 
relioion were from the ignorant masses, and therefore we nave 
the statement of Paul that "not many wise nien after the flesh, 
not many mighty, not many noble are called.' 7 _ 
It seems reasonable to suppose that had the Christian religion 



DOG FEXNEL IN THE OEIEXT 



85 



antedated the religion that built the temple of Jupiter and which 
was an old religion when that temple was finished, 435 years before 
the birth of Jesus, the Christians would have claimed that the 
religion of the Greeks was simply a modification of the religion of 
Jesus and so, when it is beyond a doubt that the religion "of the 
ancient Greeks was centuries older than that of Christians it seems 
natural and reasonable to account for these similarities in the two 
religions by saying that they result from the fact that the Chris- 
tians accidentally, or purposely, or both, grafted on to some prob- 
able facts in their religion some of the unreasonable, or merely 
poetic^ supernaturalism of the Greeks. 

No reasonable man believes the stories of Hector and A] ax as 
given in Homer's Iliad, and yet, beyond a reasonable doubt" there 
was some man like Homer and there were, almost certainly, some 
men more or less like Hector and Ajax. There were, almost 
certainly, characters more or less like Moses and Jesus Christ, but 
sound judgment dictates that the miraculous stories attached to 
each have their origin in honest error, or priestly cupidity, or 
m poetic license, as in the cases of Grecian and Eoman mythology. 

The very strongest argument that the Christians can make 
for their religion is that the Greeks and Eomans, though rep- 
resentatives of the highest intellect and intelligence in the world, 
after having heard for centuries all the arguments for their 
respective religions abandoned those religions and embraced Chris- 
tianity, and defend it to this day in the midst of the enlightenment 
of the twentieth century. But it is a logical proverb that an 
argument that proves too much proves nothing, and all the force 
of that argument for the Christian religion is "broken by the fact, 
that the Christians after having heard the argument for the 
Christian religion for more than six centuries in the very places 
where the Christian religion originated and where the Christian 
churches had become fully established, deserted that religion so 
completely, and accepted the religion of Mohammed so completely 
that Christianity, even in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and Bethany, 
and in all Asia Minor, where Paul preached and established the 
churches to which he writes the epistles in the New Testament, can 
only exist there through the suff ranee and kindness and generosity 
of the camel driving prophet of Mecca, in Arabia. 

The growth and existence of religions are no evidence whatever 
of their truth. I remember when Mormonism started in Missouri 
as a result of a Bible written for amusement by one Sidney Bigdon 
who was a preacher in the church for which I used to preach, and 
yet today, as I write, the Mormons are in Germany the most 
intellectual land in the world, making a strong defence against 



86 



DOG fennel in the orient 



an edict of that government, banishing them from the country., 
just as the Romans did. or are said to have done, the Christians; 
the Mormons taking the ground that they are moral and law- 
abiding citizens, and the stronger ground that the time has come 
when no man should he persecuted for his religious opinions, and 
I believe the most competent thinkers of the world, all -of whom 
recoonize the absurdity of Morman claims to any supernatural 
origin, will say that Germany cannot, consistently, refuse to let 
the" Mormons have a fair hearing in that country. 

In the same way, as I write this. Dowie of Chicago, claiming 
that he is the Elijah who was miraculously fed by the ravens at the 
spring that we saw in Palestine, and who afterward ascended 
bodily to heaven is arranging to take 2000 of his followers to cam]-) 
in Madison Square in New York, the most prominent part of the 
city, and the great journals and magazines are exploiting the fact. 
If 'he succeeds he will be another Jesus Christ or Mohammed or 
Jo. Smith, while if he fails he will be another Slatter or George 0. 
Barnes. In saying this I am not at all underrating the character 
of Jesus Christ. I can easily conceive how a man. much like he 
is^ described to be. in the New Testatment. could have had his just 
indignation aroused to a point of fanaticism against the same class 
of impostors as those who now in Jerusalem, in the name of 
Christianity, live in luxury and idleness on the money that they 
get from their dupes by lving. 

I personally knew George 0. Barnes. He was one ot the most 
magnetic characters I ever knew. He was more like Jesus Christ 
than any other man that America ever produced. For ( years in 
religion he was the central figure of Kentucky, attracting more 
interest and more love of the people than all the other preachers 
in Kentucky combined. I watched him closely and never knew 
in him an instance of immorality. With all of his vagaries I loved 
the man and was. and still am. proud of the fact that he loved me 
and vet Barnes believed, or professed to believe, that he could work 
miracles and that he was miraculously cared for by God. and today 
he is a follower of Dowie. content to be to that arch imposter what 
John the Baptist was to Jesus— proud to decrease that the fame 
and honor of Dowie. the Elijah of God. may increase. 

\thens appears to be about three miles square, is solidly built 
and has 240.000 inhabitants. There is nothing but corner stones 
to indicate the lines between the lands of different owners. The 
country is said to produce the finest honey in the world. 

I "found ] vino- near the Parthenon a primitive kind of a 
castiron cannon that had evidently bursted because the imperfectly 
formed ball that had been rammed into it had stuck m its bore 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



87 



when they tried to fire it out. I contemplated the result hoping 
that it had killed a lot of the vandals who were shooting it at the 
historic buildings. The Parthenon at the time of the bombardment 
had gun powder stored in it and a cannon shot exploding the 
powder caused the greater part of the ruin of the building. 

Some hundreds of years after the Chinese had invented gun 
powder and used it only to amuse children, a Christian preacher, 
named Friar Bacon, invented it again and used it for killing 
people. If there is any hell that preacher's bacon is a frier now. 

A strange article of commerce at Athens is an urn shaped 
sponge that will hold a peck. It is said that there once were 
80,000 statues on the Acropolis, but the Mohammedans destroyed 
them because it was contrary to their religion to make statuary. 
They accepted as authoritative the ten commandments of Moses 
and fairly interpreting the second commandment would not allow 
statuary. The twelve lions in the "court of lions" at the 
Alhambra were so unlike anything in the heavens above, or earth 
beneath or waters under the earth, that they were not regarded as 
coming under the interdiction of the Mosaic decalogue. 

The Jews and Christians could not stamp or print money if 
they obeyed the second commandment, and therefore they count 
it out. 

"They pardon such as they're inclined to, 
And damn all that they have no mind to." 

Many of the Cookies went to see the tomb of Pythagoras. I 
did not go because it required some extra money to do so. I took 
their word for it that he was dead. He ought to have died before 
he was born. He is the man who is responsible for the doctrine of 
the transmigration of souls and modern theosophy and of Madam 
Blavatski. It is probably justice to the man to say that if he could 
have anticipated that theosophy would grow out of what he said 
he would have declined to be born. 

I saw the place where the battle of Marathon was fought. It 
reminded me somewhat of the battlefield of Manassas, the place 
where old Mars Bob Lee and old Rockfence Jack everlastingly 
paralized and pulverized a large assortment of the Yanks. When 
we read history about those old Creek and Roman fellows we get 
the general impression that they were always honing to get killed 
just for the fun of it, and to get their names printed in the 
newspapers, but from the looks of the ground on the battlefield of 
Marathon, I am strongly under the impression that the most part 
of the scrimmage that they had there was caused by each side 
trying to get on the upper side of a mountain so as to kill the other 



88 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OKIEXT 



fellows without getting killed themselves. It is but right,, 
however, in this connection to say that my recognized knowledge 
of military tactics did not make me a Major. General in the "late 
unpleasantness" between the North and South in this country. 

It is an interesting fact in the history of the art of Athens 
that in all the magnificent statuary and paintings that are being- 
produced there up to date in the gorgeously beautiful public 
buildings of the city, I did not see a single instance of any Bible 
picture, such as predominate almost exclusively at Jerusalem and 
Rome, but all the modern as well as the ancient sculpture and 
pictures of Athens are of those old heathen gods, generally spark- 
ing- their best summer girls, and though after having seen the 
finest pictures in Paris in my young days, and some of the artistic 
spreads of Rome in my late days. I know it will damage my 
standing as an art critic, I am just rash enough to say that brand- 
splinter new fresco depictions of flirtations and assignations in 
Athens, among those ancient heathen gods and goddesses tickled 
my Dog Fennel fancy and hayseed ideas of what was pleasant to 
look at more than any pictures I have ever seen any where else. 

The story of "Prometheus bound/' between which and the 
sufferings of Jesus Christ many critics have discovered a resem- 
blance, is a favorite theme for art in Athens. While I have been 
familiar with that story and that picture for nearly half a century 
it is strange that I had never known of its companion piece until 
I saw it on the landing of a stairway in the palace of King George 
and Ms good wife. It seems that Prometheus subsequently got 
loose and made it very warm for the buzzards that were having 
little tea parties with pate de foies gras on their menu, poor 
Pometheus furnishing the liver. I suppose it was Pometheus who 
first answered the question, "Is life worth living?" by saying "It 
depends upon the liver.'' You could not give that man any pointers 
on the unpleasantness of a disordered liver, without the benefit of 
Holmans Liver Pad (for which advertisement its proprietor will 
please send me $13.) 

There is in Athens a perfectly new building that has on it a 
Greek name as long as the longest inflection of the verb "tupto," 
Bullion's Greek grammar, and which I suppose means, in the 
American language, something like "'town hall." It has on either 
side of its main entrance very tall and very ornate columns upon 
which, respectively, are statues of Apollo and Minerva in gilded 
white marble and heroic proportions. The way the old Greek 
gods and goddesses are amusing themselves in the pictures on the 
inside walls of that building, the ladies being dressed so as to avoid 
the use of dry goods as is done by a "full dress" of one of our 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OKIEXT 



89 



American "400" from the waist up, and by an Atlantic City, 
mosquito bar bathing suit from the waist down, would vex the 
righteous soul of Anthony Comstock, but I felt like, this time, I 
was where old Tony could not get me, and all the time that all the 
balance of the Cookies were out seeing about old Pythagoras I was 
sitting there all alone in those elegant surroundings looking at 
those pictures but, honor bright now, the picture that I looked at 
most was one of Pygmalion warming the statue Galatea into life 
by holding a torch before his or its breast. You could see the 
light coming into its chiseled eyes, the flush into its cheek and lips 
and the blue veins beginning to course down its white marble arms 
while its marble feet had not separated from the marble pedestal 
upon which it stood. 

At our lunch table in the hotel we had in the toothpick hold- 
ers, toothpicks that grew in bunches on shrubs, just ready for use, 
each one having on one end a little dried flower, which being eaten 
had the effect of a whisky killer. The table cloths were very 
handsome and hung down onto the floor. The young fellows and 
their best girls said the table cloths were perfectly splendid to 
play "hold hands" under. I am not going to depose ; I am a mar- 
ried man. 

In Athens the bootblacks sit in a chair and the customer 
stands. You would think the bootblack's box was a hand organ. 

I saw a band of some sort of carnival masqueraders set a brilliant 
thing like a May pole in the streets and dance around it. 

I heard a fellow talking Greek to a donkey and the donkey 
understood it just as well as a Kentucky mule understands 
American when you use the expletives that are common in talking 
to mules. I had always had some misgivings about that storv of 
Balaam and his donkey conversing together in Hebrew, but when 
I saw that Athens donkey understand Greek it assisted my faith 
to realize how the Bible story might be true. 

I heard two of our Cookie women talking. One said that in 
the city where she lived she was in the habit of setting a little dog 
up on the seat beside her when she took carriage rides and that 
one day a woman had asked her if it would not be better to take 
some little poor child with her. The woman to whom she was 
talking said that she thought the one who rode in the carriage 
showed good taste in taking the dog instead of the child. I am 
opposed, to Socialism politically and to hell religiously, but 
candidly, I don't see what we can do with that brand of women 
without Socialism in this world and a hell in the next one. 

After we went aboard the Moltke some of the Cookies said 
they saw King George and his wife — don't know her name; call her 



90 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIEXT 



Georgianna— sail around our big boat in a beautiful little steam 
launch. I didn't see them ; didn't see the launch ; I saw the ocean 
they had sailed in. 

" We left Piraeus at 5:30 p. m. on a beautiful evening. We 
passed a big Eussian war ship lying at anchor. Our band played 
a Eussian national air. while the band on the warship played a 

German national air. . +• ~u 

On February 25 we sailed from Piraeus for Constantinople, 
distance 356 miles. We passed the place on the Hellespont, where 
Byron says that Leander swam to Hero and he, himself, swam to 
fame Edgar Allen Poe said that he (Poe) swam eight miles up 
the Ohio river. I think he lied-or used Poe-tic license; he was 
a poet I have a record as a swimmer my own self I swam and 
saved a man in the river Seine, in Prance, who was drowning Yon 
can read about it in "Behind the Bars : 31498/' It was doing 
things like that that caused my grateful country to furnish me 
the peculiarly favorable circumstances binder which to write a 
book by that name. I could not swim from Sestos to Abydos, four 
miles, 'and I do not believe that Leander or Byron did— lair 

SWmi Slin 2 make s great liars. Even Mark Twain yielded and 
I feel the temptation to do so— but then I have been a preacher 
and the habits of early yonth are hard to get over. 

"CoeW non animum, mutant qui trans mare currunt 

On that dav I saw Asia for the first time : the country that is 
responsible for preachers and the Salvation Army. I saw the place 
where Xerxes "lashed the Hellespont with chains/ 

That's the place that Europa swam across on a bull. 1 hat s 
another swimming lie that I do not believe unless it was a fin-back 
bull whale so she could hold on like to a pummel on a side-saddle. 
I didn't see any bull tracks on the shore and in traveling j mm 
ouoht not to believe anything he hears and not more than half that 
he %ees. The statements of travelers should be received cum 
o-rano salis" — with a barrel of salt. 

There is only one thing about Constantinople that I was * not 
disappointed in and that was the dogs. One Cookie counted fifty- 
one dogs on one square, and another counted 903 dogs from the 
landinl to the hotel. The dog population at the last census was 
900 000 and the people 1,000,000. That is only one dog to five 
people while among our poorest people in Kentucky there are five 
12 to one person. In Constantinople all canines are of the 
-yellow dog" variety. The people spend some part of their time 
in their bouses, and the dogs are so much more ^ ^^^g 
people because the dogs are always on the streets. The greater 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OKIEXT 



91 



part of them are always asleep. They don't turn around three 
times like our American dog does before they lie down, but they 
just lie down anywhere so it's somewhere that people have to walk 
and vehicles have to drive. They are kind, good dogs and never 
bite anybody or bite each other, except when one by some accident 
or mistake steps across the line that it is agreed among them is 
the limit of his diocese and then all of those in the domain that 
has been encroached upon, jump on him and bite him. 

Nobody in Constantinople ever purposely hurts a dog. 
Millions of miles are annually traveled in Constantinople in 
getting around dogs. One of the first things I noticed in 
Constantinople was thousands and thousands of big fine wild ducks, 
that light on the roofs of the buildings. I thought of sending a 
cablegram to Grover Cleveland to come over and bring his gun, 
until it occurred to me that the Mohammedans would not let him 
shoot at the ducks for fear he might shoot a dog. 

I don't think the dogs there have so many fleas on them as 
some writers represent, because there are not enough fleas to go 
around. 

On the way to Constantinople we saw Mt. Olympus, its top 
being covered with snow. The gods of the Greeks used to come 
down onto the top of Mt. Olympus to meet prominent Greek func- 
tionaries with whom they wished to discuss the political and 
religious affairs of Greece. These gods also had a habit of coming 
down on mountains to meet, by moonlight, reigning belles among 
the Greek ladies, when their husbands and papas had been told by 
them that they were only going out to their clubs or church socials. 
The gods there don't do those things these days. That habit of the 
gods of meeting people up on the tops of high mountains naturally 
grew out of the willingness of the respective parties to meet on half 
way grounds as nations now do in making treaties. It was not so 
far to heaven from the top of a mountain as it was from the level 
plain below. 

The Hebrew God did the same way. He had a conference of 
days with Moses and would come down onto the top of Mt. Sinai 
to meet him. In the same way Jesus took pains to select a high 
mountain from the top of which to ascend to heaven. Mt. Calvary, 
where he had been crucified, stands there just a short and conven- 
ient distance from a gate of Jerusalem, and would have seemed, to 
a mere carnal mind, a good place from which to ascend to heaven, 
just as it was a good place to crucify him so that almost anybody 
in Jerusalem might witness it. But Calvary is a little low moun- 
tain while the Mount of Olives is the highest one near Jerusalem, 
and therefore Jesus must have spent the half of a day in climbing 



92 



DOG FENNEL IjST THE ORIENT 



up the Mount of Olives to get a high point from which to begin 
the ascension to heaven. 

When I saw I was getting to Constantinople I began to feel 
that I was getting a long way from home, and I remembered how 
proud I was when I learned to spell the long name of that town- 
It was when I was quite a youth. 

It was while looking at Mt. Olympus that I saw the first por- 
poises that I had seen since I had crossed the ocean years before. 

Oh, no, the porpoises were not on the mountain — on the sea 
where they usually stay ! They have the same old habit of running- 
races with ships. They contracted this habit in the old days of sail 
ships and the increased speed of the steam ships makes them get 
such a move on themselves to have any fun with a ship that they 
quit, like their feeling were hurt, after a race of a mile or so. The' 
number of sea gulls that you meet at Constantinople is surprising. 
They are about half the size of those you see in New York harbor. 
Those big gulls followed the Moltke for about three days out from 
New York, and there seemed to be about the same lot of them, say 
fifty, all the time. They, of course, follow the ships to get things to 
eat that are thrown overboard. I would see them the last thing- 
at night and the first thing in the morning, and I am still curious 
to know what they did with themselves during the nights. Even 
if the}' could go to sleep on the water, slashing around as it does, 
how could they sleep and keep up with the ship at the same time?' 

The little gulls in Constantinople — they are about as big as 
crows — light on houses, like the ducks do, but there are only a few 
large buildings near the water that either the ducks or gulls light 
on, and why they select those particular buildings and not others 
that seem equally as good for their purposes, you cannot see. 

I was disappointed in the "Golden Horn" that I had read sa 
much about. I had expected to see domes or minarets or some- 
thing glittering with gold, and something about the formation of 
the harbor that looked like the horn or crescent of the Mohamme- 
dans, but what they told me was the "Golden Horn" was a sombre- 
looking part of the harbor that stood off by itself and so land 
locked as to make it very secure for the immense number of various 
kinds of ships that were in it, but I did not think it nearly so 
beautiful as various bays and harbors that I had seen. 

The thing that first attracts your attention in coming to 
Constantinople, as you look at it from the ship is the minarets of 
the mosques. Mosques seem to be fine and important according 
to the number of minarets that they can afford. The mosque of 
Achmed, at Constantinople, has six minarets and the mosque at 
Mecca, in Arabia, the birthplace of Mohammedanism, has seven 



DOG FENNEL m THE OEIEXT 



93 



minarets. These minarets among the Mohammedans take the 
place of steeples among the Christians, neither the Mohammedan 
nor the Christian having any idea what steeples are for, except that 
the Mohammedan uses one out of his several minarets for the 
calling of the muezzin. The Christian sticks his steeple or steeples 
up on the top of his church and the Mohammedan builds his 
minaret or minarets up from the ground, near and around the 
mosque. These minarets seem to be about 225 feet high and are 
built of stone. They are the same size all the way up. At six 
o'clock in the morning, at noon and at six o'clock at night, and at 
nine in the morning at three in the evening, or afternoon as thev 
foolishly call it every where except in the South in the United 
States, the muezzin climbs up a stair inside some one of these 
minarets at each mosque and he calls out a set formula that has 
some very complimentary remarks about Allah in it, and winds up 
with a notice that all the faithful must come to prayers. Praying- 
is a heavy job among the Mohammedans. The devotion of the 
Irish Catholic girl who gets up at six o'clock on a cold winter 
morning and goes to mass, ain't in it as compared with what the 
Mohammedan does. In fact among the higher classes of Moham- 
medan society a man hardly has any time through the day to do 
anything, but smoke and drink coffee and pray and play chess, but 
after these labors of the clay are over, he can go to his home with 
the happy assurance that he can find his several dozen wives there 
to cheer him instead of finding an only wife out at a club or church 
sociable, or ministerial pound party, or female ankle exhibition 
to raise the money for the preacher's salary, as would be the case 
in America. 

This muezzin, like an American auctioneer, gets his job on the 
strength of his voice. A mere ordinary announcement of what he 
has to say would not answer the purpose. He has to intone it like 
the priests do and it is a sound very much like that of an asthmatic 
bagpipe that you hear about like you do a telephone that needs a 
little shaking up. 

Some of the finest of these mosques were originally built by 
the Christians for churches and then the Mohammedans came 
along and took them away from the Christians and used them for 
mosques, utilizing the pictures and statuary and candles and altars 
of the Christians for kindling material and other domestic 
purposes. In the same spirit of generosity toward the pagan 
religions, the Catholics in Eome have brought obelisks from Egypt 
and stuck them up in front of Christian churches and then 
climbed the monuments of ancient Eome, that had pagan gods on 
top of them, and fixed hoops off of beer kegs up above their heads, 



91 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OBIEXT 



for haloes, and then named these old pagan gods for Christian 
saints. The little amenities that religions show each other every 
time they get a chance is real touching. 

I saw" a Catholic priest who was a Cookie looking at the 
Mohammedans in one of these mosques, bowing themselves to the 
floor, and saving their prayers most reverently and that priest had 
a grin on his hard Irish face that indicated that he was awfully 
tickled at the delusion of the poor Mohammedan. It was not the 
particular brand of damfoolery that that priest got his grub and 
traveling expenses out of in his own church in America. 

Constantine. who built this dog heaven, in the early part of 
the Fourth century (A. D.) was converted to Christianity from 
the pagans and he was the party of the first part, who made 
Christianity a go. and a business success, without which no religion 
can thrive." As a defender of the new faith he had all the 
strenuousness of the proverbial "new broom."' His wife, true to 
the religion of her mother, which was therefore good enough for 
her (Mrs. Constantine) did not see the argument for the new 
' faith as her husband did., and when she made some points that he 
could not answer, by ordinary logical processes, he resorted to the 
more popular mode of theological argumentation and boiled her in 
oil like a sardine for an hour or two. The cook upon examining 
her. to see if she was done, found her dead. The modesty of 
Constantine was. like that of the most conspicuous followers 
generally of the : uneek and lowly Xazarene/ V Constantine brought 
from Rome a splendid column which had been erected to a heathen 
god and he had this column set up in Constantinople and had his 
own statue put on it. posing as the god Apollo, with things that 
look like bayonets sticking out from around his head to represent 
the rays that originally were supposed to radiate from the head of 
Apollo, and which, in "the subsequent mixing up of the pictures of 
the pagan and Christian artists and of the theology of the pagan 
and Christian preachers they stick around the head of J esus, so as 
to make a god out of a carpenter, and those old Apollo rays are still 
sticking out around the head of Jesus, in his pictures in Lexington 
churches even to this day. 

In the pictures of the saints in Rome it is, of course, easy to 
paint around and over the head of each a hoop that stands up in 
the air, with nothing to hold it. but. in the statuary, that hoop 
won't stand up in the air and so each saint has a rod of iron 
sticking up out of his back hair, to hold his hoop up, the supposition 
of the church being that no true believer will ever be so sacrilegious 
as to go around behind things in theology to see how they are 
managed. 



DOG- FEXXEL IN THE OKIENT 



95 



That column and statue of Constantine are now so damaged 
and the worse for wear for the more than 1500 years that they have 
been standing there, that they are all hooped and splinted and 
bandaged in a scandalous manner. The rays around the head of the 
hybrid of Apollo and Constantine standing on the top of it are 
hanging around like the hairpins of a female poet and old Constan- 
tine's face is all patched up and plastered over to hold its different 
features together, like that of an Irishman who had been to 
Donnybrook fair or to a wake. 

Close to this is a very ancient fire tower. It seems to have 
been built some time about 1000 years ago so that the firemen could 
go up on it to get a good view of the fire and to give newspaper 
reporters an opportunity by going up on this to get all the details 
of the fire for the early morning dailies, without going to the fire. 
I have been a newspaper reporter. Close bv there is some kind of 
a big building where the guides feed the pigeons like they do at St. 
Mark's in Venice, for the entertainment of travelers. I do not know 
whether or not they had arranged to have an extra number of 
pigeons present because the Cookies on this occasion represented the 
most people and the most money that had ever struck that town 
in any one party from any place so far away, but I believe that the 
ordinary traveler would 'be liable to exaggerate the number of 
pigeons' there. I do not think there were more than a million. 
When I was a newspaper reporter I would have estimated them as 
being between two and three millions. But there is a pretty broad 
range for a x pigeon estimate between and two, on one extreme and 
3,000,000, on the other. They were all our commonest variety of 
blue domestic pigeons of America. Poverty and rags and religion 
and dogs flourish with a tropical luxuriousness in Constantinople. 
And yet wealth and poverty in Constantinople are brought into a 
juxtaposition that would give a Socialist a chronic case of the 
jimjams to gaze on, if a Socialist could raise money enough to 
get to Constantinople. 

The Cooks had put up the money for us in good shape and 
the Turks turned their town wide open for us to look at. They 
only drew the line against letting our men go in to see the ladies in 
the harems. They had heard that we had nineteen preachers along. 
But they let our women folks in and the women told us and 
especially did some of our more ancient dames tell me, knowing I 
was going to write a book, and while it might not do for me to say 
here exactly what those nice old ladies told me, I know enough 
about the inside of a harem to tell you all that these stories that 
the missionaries tell you about the miseries of harems are as big 
lies as were ever told. Those women in those harems have a regular 



'96 



DOG EEXXEL IX THE OBIEXT 



picnic of it. and they have many a jolly good laugh over the pity 
that is bestowed upon them by the Christian world. The main 
difference between the harem of the Sultan at Constantinople, the 
head of the Mohammedan church, and the harem of Edward VII., 
in London, the head of Protestantism, is that the Sultan keeps all 
of his in one place and don't lie about it and don't care who 
knows it. while the King of England has his harem scattered 
around in different places, some times other mens" wives, and tells 
a million lies about it every year. The Sultan and the King- 
equally believe in the Old Testament of our Bible, and the Sultan 
calls attention to the fact that Solomon had a harem of an even 
1.000 women, and he justly calls the King of England an infidel 
because the King does not openly say that a harem is all right. 

It will be noticed that I did not say that the Pope, the head 
of Catholicism, which is the butt end of the Christian religion, 
has a harem. Good reason why : too old and ugly : girls won^t 
have it. 

Among all this religion and dogs and rags. we. in the treasure 
house of the Sultan, among other things ran upon a piece of 
furniture about half the size of an ordinary bed that was worth 
.•$20,000,000. It was the throne which had been captured by the 
Turks from the Persians. It and the footstool that was with it. 
were made of solid beaten gold and the two had in them from a 
peck to a half bushel of diamonds and every other precious stone 
known to the world. And yet that government is bankrupt for 
the want of money, and can barely buy Easter bonnets for the 
Sultan's wives. 

Sultans and Popes and Kings and Presidents and priests and 
preachers all get rich and the masses of the people all get poor, in 
exactly the ratio of the amount of religion among them. I am 
not a Socialist, though some of their principlas are right, but I tell 
you that under this whole infernal business there is burning a 
Socialistic volcano that some of these days — I do not say fine days 
— will throw out a lot of hot stuff that will bury this alliance of 
political and religious rottenness so deep that Herculaneum and 
Pompeii and Martinique will not be a circumstance. 

The statues of Guiordano Bruno and of Garibaldi cast their 
shadows upon the walls of the Vatican and they forebode more 
than the handwriting on the wall at Belshazzar's feast. 

We have many Coal Oil Johnies and Copper Kings and Coal 
Barons any one of whom could buy that divan or throne from 
Turkey and bring it to Xew York and show it for $1,000,000 a year, 
but for the fact that some body would steal it before it had been 
Iiere a week and break it up and peddle out the gold and jewels. 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 97 

if she^ull Pr ° bably " if She W(mM > and would *>t 

Sultans and Vanderbilts say alike, -damn the people " 
Columns m Constantinople as in Rome, form a salient feature 
m the attractions of Constantinople. There is an elegant new 
one erected on the site of the old Hippodrome by T^mZ 
of Germany, and there is the column of Theodo'sius erected Z 
Justinian, and then there is an immense square column that slopes 
toward the top and that has been mutilated from top to bottom 
Tins is the result of- the fact that it was originally covered wTh 
brass, from bottom to top, and the pious crusaders 7 on their way 
to Jerusalem to get the cross on which Jesus had been crucified 
wrenched all the brass off that great column and stole it They 
may have thought it was gold. They could not have used it Z 
make cannon in those days. Then there is a beautiful coCn tha' 
was brought there from Delphi nat 

in 'i^T^t Achma( \ built ™\ 326 Tears ago, is the finest 
Z ?, } - , Its Slx mmare ts are eighteen feet in diameter and 
probab y 2 50 feet high and each has three doors and balconts W 
w ch the muezzin cal s to prayers. They are of marble and beau- 
tifully carved from bottom to top. We all had to get into slippers 
but there were so many of us that they did not make us pull off 
our shoes but only required us to put the slippers on over our 

t°?nr , u an . d b0JS in attendance to put the slippers 

on for us. There was such a scramble for slippers so as to get in 
as soon as possible that any body just got the first pair of slippers 
of any kind that they could get hold of. Almost as often as other- 
wise some woman with a pretty little foot went slapping around 
like a clog dancer at a vaudeville, while some man would have a 
pair into which he could barely get the ends of his toes, and went 
walking around with half of his unhallowed Christian sole leather 
profaning by its contact, the sacred rugs or pavements of the great 
prophet of Allah. I put my number seven and a half shoe into' a 
number thirteen slipper and managed them somewhat like snow 
shoes. Many of these slippers were then used for the first time 
and they had gotten them nearly all large, anticipating the rush 
tor them that would be with our big party and especially if the 
parties of the Cooks and the Clarks got there at the same time 
as they did to many places, making nearly 1000 in all. 

The altar in the mosque of Achmed is so arranged as that 
when the people bow before it in prayer their faces will be toward 
Mecca. 



a 



In the mosque of St. Sophia which was built A. D. 316, for 
Christian church and therefore not arranged with reference to 



98 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



the people praying with their faces toward Mecca, there was some 
kind of a scheme by which those praying in it were supposed to 
be praying toward Mecca, but it involved some kind ot a 
theological subtlety that I could not get onto as expounded by our 
Turkish guide whose vocabulary was hardly . equal to the 

emergency^ <)f gt gopMa wag ,,„;„ by J ust inian and it took 
10 000 workmen and 1.000 artists five years to build it. Its mam 
room from the marble pavement to the top of the dome that covers 
180 feet high. It has eight pillars that were brought from 
Ephesus and eight columns of porphyry that were brought from 
Baaltec There is m this mosque what is known as the "sweating 
column " This sweating is supposed to be miraculous and if you 
1 before it "the Mohammedans say you will be miraculously 
cured of any disease you have. I think you have to find it when 
t sweating in order to be cured of your disease. I looked at it 
mi te cbsely and could not see that it was sweating when we were 
ftere and as I was not sick any way I could not say my prayers 
o to tesVits claimed power. If I could have come across that 
column when I was seasick I might have ventured on a few pate 
nostos. or the Episcopal service for the sea or some original 
composition. , . 

Yerv high up in the ceiling above the altar the guides show 
-the center of Christ's face." This has appeared there miraculously, 
how long since I did not learn. Of course the Mohammedan 
1 o?on is not at all dependent upon Christ for its authority but 
ht C iinraeulous appearance of Christ's face there is construed by 
the Mohammedans as being intended by Christ to instruct t 
C r^ans that the Mohammedan religion is all right and that al 
who decline to receive it must do so at their own risk I think I 
1m a a pt at discovering resemblances of this kind to the human 
Tee I ed to find them in the fire by the thousand when we 
mimed wood in the old times. I have seen all the men and women 
and cows in the moon that anybody has ever seen I saw and 
reco«K m a second before it had ever been explained to me 
he Underfill natural picture of Shakespeare with hree-fou ths 
of an oval frame around it. that has recently been discovered m 
lL ceZg o the Mammoth Cave, where no man could ever have 
lotten and I recognized instantly the natural formation, on the 
real to Grenada known as "the old man of the mountain;' bu 
ho m i I tried faithfully to see what they said was the center of 
t he face of Christ" in the ceiling of the mosque of St Sophia, I 
lould not see it I saw a white spot that looked like a leak m he 
roo had mad the fresco fall off, and that looked like it suggested 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



99 



a job for a plumber in the heavy lead roof, and I supposed that 
in the same way the sweating of that column might be accounted 
for, if indeed it ever sweated and was not simply a scheme to offset 
various things of that kind in the Catholic churches. But the 
pious Catholics and Protestants among the Cookies around me 
gazed reverently up at the alleged miraculous center of the face of 
Christ and, whether they saw it or not, ratified the Mohammedan 
claim of its actuality by their reverent behavior, and being away 
off there by myself I did not propose to bring upon myself any 
avoidable odium theologicum, by saying I could not see it; but it 
furnished me a demonstration that Christians and Mohammedans 
male and female, will combine to make fools and asses and liars 
of themselves to make themselves and others believe in religion 
and supernaturalism though they are ready to murder and rob each 
other, in war, because they do not agree about the details of their 
creeds. 

While we were in one of these mosques the hour for prayer 
came and there were about 1,000 men who assembled for prayer. 
In Christianity in America the churches so depend upon the women 
that if their influence was withdrawn for a single year the church 
would collapse. In Mohammedanism and in Christianity in the 
Orient women are very little in evidence. Their view of that 
matter is the teaching of Paul (1. Cor. 14.35)) "If they (women) 
will learn anything let them ask their husbands at home." 

There is in the mosque a box in which a hand of Sultan 
Achmed is said to be preserved. The room is about 200 feet in 
diameter. Mosques, like Christian cathedrals, have little or no 
arrangement for anybody to sit. .The people stand just as thick 
as they can crowd together. There was only one pew in St. 
Sophia and that belonged to a private individual and was in the 
part of the house most remote from where the service is con- 
ducted. It had seats for about four people. There is a large door 
into the mosque through which the rich enter and a smaller one 
through which the poor enter. The candor shown by the 
Mohammedans in their discrimination between the rich and the 
poor is real refreshing as compared with the hypocrisy in that 
matter shown by the Christians in this country. 

We went up a stair and out onto a lead roof to get a view of 
the part of the harbor known as the "Golden Horn." It affords a 
good opportunity to see what is to be seen from there but the view 
is not specially beautiful. The exterior of the building is not 
attractive and looks somewhat dilapidated. There are many 
lamps which hang by long chains so nearly to the floor that a tall 
person can reach them from the floor. 



L.of C. 



100 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

■ One of the most wonderful features in the Orient is the 
enormous burdens the people carry on their backs. We saw much 
of this in Constantinople. There are men whose whole business 
is to earrr heavy burdens and they carry as much as one ought to 
put on the back of a good mule in America. Those men walk so 
stooping that the burden lies all along their backs and rests on a 
kind of a packsaddle that is fastened on their hips I saw on the 
back of one of these men a package which I estimated was six feet 
by three by two, and an another one a package that I thought was 
five feet by three by two and a half. I saw a man carrying on his 
back, apparently from a furniture store to the home of some 
purchaser, a wardrobe which in Lexington would have .been loaded 
by two or three men into a furniture car and hauled off by two 

h ° rS We visited a museum of antiquities in the city. The most 
wonderful thing m it is the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great 
It is about twelve feet long, six feet broad and five feet .high The 
guides claim that this sarcophagus is the eighth wonder of the 
world and it is certainly wonderful, its history its workmanship and 
111 This sarcophagus is made of alabaster Its entire exterior 
L a solid mass of the most intricate and elaborate carving repre- 
senting the exploits of Alexander. There are so many figures on 
1 that it would require a whole day to give it a thorough 
examination The interior of the sarcophagus, which as large 
eSugn to hold fifteen or twenty men is all most elaborate y 
scXtured The top of the sarcophagus which would probably 
weS 2 000 pounds, is all elaborately ornamented and is raised 
Tbout a foot high so as to rest on a block of stone put on each corner 
o the body of the sarcophagus so as to allow persons to see down 
Mo it. This is also true of many other wonderful sarcophagi 
in the museum. „ ,„ , , , . 

Alexander the Great died in Babylon about 300 B. C and this 
.arcothSns was ormd in Sydon, which is on the coast of Palestine, 
onlv fifteen years ago. How that sarcophagus got hat far from 
re xlexander die! is one of the mysteries of the thing. It had 
been opened and the body of Alexander was not in it and the 
whole Sarcophagus was found in a chamber that had been hewn 
Tn the toUd stone and the chamber had been hermetically sealed 
up It was found by a farmer who was paid the equivalent of 
$10 000 in our money for it. The sarcophagus is in almost perfect 
Se=er4 tion, the only damage to it seeming to be such as might 
have come from handling it. I suppose it would weigh 10,000 
o,nd° Of conrse it would naturally occur to some one to say 
that there was some fraud abont this, but such seems impossible. 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OKIENT 



101 



the date of its finding is so recent and the facts of its transportation 
and placing in that museum so recent and so public and the 
historical interest of the thing so great and the sculptures so 
evidently representing the battles between Alexander the Great and 
the Persians beside many other evidences of identification known to 
the scholars and archeologists who have seen it, that the successful 
perpetration of such a fraud would seem as wonderful as that it 
should be what is claimed for it. 

The making of a thing of such proportions as that and the 
time necessary to make it preclude the possibility of its having 
been done secretly. But in addition to all this is the fact that 
there are but few, if any sculptors now living who could make 
such a thing and there never was a time in the whole history of 
Palestine when any body in that country could have made- such a 
thing as that sarcophagus and you cannot conceive what motive 
they could have had in making such a thing and disposing of it in 
that way. One theory of it is that it was made for the body of 
Alexander and that his remains, from some unknown reason, were 
never put into it, and that it was thus hidden for safe keeping until 
the remains of Alexander could be put into it, and that the secret 
of its hiding place was lost until recently discovered by accident 
by a farmer who was digging in the regular pursuit of his business. 

It is easy enough to see how the priests can palm off on people 
who want to be deceived, the old bones and rags that they claim to 
be those of saints, and the books of alleged very ancient date that 
they discover every semi-occasionally to bolster up the claims of 
their religion, but all of those are quite different from the story of 
the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great that we saw in Con- 
stantinople. From any view that you can take of it, it is certainly 
very wonderful and by no means the least wonderful is to suppose 
the thing a fraud. That such a thing is there now in Constanti- 
nople is either so, or I am lying about it, or am mistaken. It seems 
almost impossible that I could honestly imagine all the details of 
this story, without any basis for it, and it seems just as strange 
that I would want to tell a lie about it when from the circumstances 
it is so easy to expose me. Assuming then that I actually saw it 
and heard that history of it and yet that the whole thing was a 
fraud that had been perpetrated only fifteen years ago, how easy it 
is to account for the things we saw at Jerusalem and that are 
offered by the Christian world as evidence of the truth of the story 
that is told us there about Jesus Christ. 

For instance at Bethlehem we were shown a hole in the rock 
in which the whole Christian world agrees that Jesus Christ was 
born. Nobody claims to know when that hole was chiseled out of 



102 UOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

that rock, nor by whom it was done nor for what it was done. 
There are a great many holes like it chiseled out of other rocks m 
other places in Palestine. 

The whole Christian world that accepts our canonic .New 
Testament says that Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem and 
"cradled in a manger" in that stable. The Apochryphal New 
Testament says Jesus was born in a cave m Bethlehem. it is- 
evidently not' what we commonly mean by a cave and as tor its 
behw a'stable it is not as much like a place that was built tor a 
stable as a place I dug and walled up for a dairy m Kentucky. 
That the alleged stable in Bethlehem in which it is said Jesus was 
born therefore, may be a fraud, seems immensely greater than that 
the alleged sarcophagus of Alexander in Constantinople may be 
a fraud And yet while there is hardly a successful gambler m 
America who would bet two to one that the sarcophagus of 
Alexander in Constantinople is what is claimed for it, whole 
governments are built and run based on the story that Jesus Christ 
was born in that hole in Bethlehem, that looks like it may have 
been made to keep vegitables in and some people call a man a bad 
may "ecause he does lot belieye stories of that kind when these 
stories are used to proye the truth of Christianity. From a stand- 
point like this that sarcophagus of Alexander was the most inter- 
esting thing I saw in Constantinople. ■ 

I asked the Mohammedan guide who was showing us through 
that museum to tell me what he thought was the true religion and 
he said "Honor your father and mother, don't steal, and do good 
to your neighbor," and then we are great enough fools to send on 
to those people, to convert them to Christianity the same brand of 
male and female missionaries that we sen to China to rob and 
murder them. We send oyer there and tell them that Mohammed 
made his converts by the sword, and that our Jesus was the Prince 
of Peace and then the Mohammedan looks over m the waters of the 
"Golden Horn" and sees it full of the war vessels of all the 
Christian nations in the world and he wonders why any people 
will tell lies that nobody is liable to believe. 

The stupidity of the Christians in saying that Mohammad 
made his converts by the sword is but little better than idiocy- 
How could he have gotten armies to follow him that were large 
enough to go from his own land and capture all the principal lands 
of the Christians unless they believed m him? 

When we started away from one of those mosques where we 
had seen the Mohammedans praying I got into a carriage with two 
of our Cookie women who seemed to be rich and one that I had not 
talked to before, whose nose was rather suspiciously red, said to the 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIEXT 



103 



other one, "I wish I had brought a bottle of whisky," and then she 
showed a Turkish pipe that she had bought to take home to her 
neighbor's son. I asked her if she said her prayers when she was 
in where all those Mohammedans were praying. She said "Yes; 
I thought it was a good opportunity and I said my prayers ; when 
we are in Turkey we must do as Turkeys do." She asked me a 
good many questions about such things as the occasion suggested, 
most of which, fortunately, I was able to answer her to her evident 
gratification and appreciation, but she did not impress me very 
favorably. She seemed to be meditating as to whether I had any 
special meaning in asking her about saying her prayers just after 
what she had said about the whisky bottle and the pipe, but T did 
not intimate to her that what I had said was suggested by what 
she had said. After that that woman got to be one of the best 
friends I had on the cruise, subscribed for this book and got others 
to do it. and will read and recognize this story. 

We went to see a house in Constantinople that is said to be 
the most beautiful house in the world, and I believe it is. It has 
a strange history. It was completed only a few years ago. Nobody 
lives in it and it does not seem likely that anybody will do so soon. 
It is built right along the edge of the sea and is between a quarter 
and a half mile long. It was built for a palace by a Sultan who 
is now confined in a lunatic asylum as an insane man, the story 
being that he became insane from building that palace, but there 
are many who say that the charge of insanity against him was only 
a scheme of the present Sultan to get rid of him. The palace that 
the present Sultan lives in is fairly handsome, but is a very plain 
affair as compared with the new and unoccupied one, and the idea 
seems to be that the present Sultan, from some superstition, is 
afraid to live in the new palace. 

The new palace is complete and furnished to the minutest 
detail. I do not know upon what terms we were taken through 
it, because the Cooks had arranged all of that, but I do not suppose 
that in any way it brings any revenue to the government. The 
building is of marble as white as snow and the exterior walls of 
it are iiio"- 'aooratelv ornamented with the most exquisite and 
varied sculpturing. Rev. Dr. Marshall said he had. until he saw 
that nalaee. regarded Windsor Castle as the prettiest place in the 
world, but that this new palace in Constantinople was handsomer 
than Windsor. I never was inside of Windsor palace, but I saw 
the exterior of the building when I was a young man. My 
impression is that the grounds around Windsor are more beautiful 
than those of that new palace at Constantinople, though the palace 
has the beautiful view of the sea, but my recollection of Windsor 



104 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



is that its exterior 'appearance ■ is quite plain and sombre as 
compared with the new palace in Constantinople. 

From my boyhood until now I have, at times, taken the 
material furnished by the Book of Revelations to describe heaven 
and have tried to construct out of it the most beautiful place of 
which my mind could conceive and I have never been able to 
produce any thing nearly so beautiful as that palace by the sea at 
Constantinople and I do. not believe that the man who wrote the 
book of Revelations ever could have gotten up such a conception. 
There are two gates at the entrance of the palace which are the 
largest I have ever seen. They are gilded and shine like pure 
gold. On one side of it are two other gates and a gateway that 
are even handsomer than the others and from which pilgrims start 
on their journey to Mecca, which every Mohammedan must do 
once in his life if it is possible for him to do it, and which every 
Mohammedan hopes, sometime, to do, and will make great 
sacrifices to do. 

In that palace there were some mantels that were made of 
clear cut glass and some of beautifully colored cut glass and some 
of silver. The centerpieces in some of the ceilings and the 
chandeliers glistened with gems. The ceilings were supported by 
monolithic columns of costly marbles and of costly carving, and the 
floors in many places were covered with the most costly gobelin tap- 
estries. Tapestries which I had in other places seen hung on the 
walls as the finest of oil paintings are were here spread on the floor 
to walk on. I could see how those ladies in their fine shoes or how 
some of those rich men in elegant shoes that seemed never to have 
trodden on the ground might walk over those rugs and tapestries 
and not hurt them, and I felt like old Arkansaw and I ought not 
to be allowed to walk on them, but nobody said anything to the 
contrary and I walked over them just like the rest of the people. 

"Old Arkansaw" had been out seeing the world before and 
his ideal of beauty was Versailles, but he said that was finer than 
anything at Versailles. I told him I had been to Paris, but had 
never seen Versailles only twelve miles away. He seemed to think 
that was a very strange thing. I have always regretted that I 
did not. 

The ball room in the palace had its marble floor covered with 
a floor of inlaid woods of different colors and looked like mosaic. 
The whole palace was a picture gallery, the walls and ceilings being 
covered with statuary and fresco paintings. The bath rooms were 
in alabaster and rare marbles, the walls carved full of vines and 
flowers. There was an immense hall that seemed almost covered 
with gold. We walked through this great building each room or 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



105 



hall or passage or stairway different from any part of it we had 
seen before, and going so fast that we could only glance at each 
place, until we were tired of walking and tired of looking and 
dazed beyond expression by the wonders and beauties around us, 
and then our conductors told us we had not seen half of it and that 
we would not be able to stand the labor of seeing it all at one time, 
and we started back to where we had entered. 

We got back on the ship in time for our dinner at seven 
o'clock. Next morning, February 27, I went back into the city for 
the purpose of spending a good part of the day strolling around 
and seeing the sights by myself, but before I had gone a half mile 
I found the streets so intricate that I soon found that I would get 
lost, and believed it would cost me more money than I had to 
spare to have myself found and returned to the Moltke in good 
order, necessary wear and tear excepted. 

So I took a small boat back to the steamer and spent a good 
part of the day aboard. But on Saturday, February 28, I started 
out again to see the city alone and on foot, but from some reason 
I cannot recall much of the appearance of the streets in Constanti- 
nople. In my memory I have gotten them blended with the streets 
of some other place so that I cannot well separate them. I saw a 
body of Turkish soldiers. They were splendidly uniformed and 
the most formidable looking body of men. I saw some ladies riding 
in a carriage with two horses and I thought each set of harness must 
have cost $1,000. They were the handsomest I had ever seen. All 
the ladies wear black veils about a foot long. 

On the night of February 27 the wife of Mr. Edwin A. 
Neupert, of Buffalo, N. Y., died on board the ship. Her^ husband 
and son were traveling with her and they continued the journey 
with us. The husband's conduct was pathetic but philosophic. 
Mrs. Neupert was found dead in her bed when the father and son 
arose in the morning. When a steward afterward asked him how 
his wife was he said "She is resting." He managed it so as not to 
let it be known, except to a few, until after the body was taken 
ashore. He said he did not want to do anything to mar the 
happiness of others. I suppose I have about as little dread of 
death as people generally have, but I have always hoped I would 
die at my home and be buried with my own dead and I had there- 
fore tried, to arrange to have my remains shipped to my home in 
case of my death. I had been told in New York that it would 
probably cost $3,000 to do this in case of my death and I therefore 
asked Mr. Neupert about the cost of sending the remains of his 
-wife home. He told me that the embalming and shipping to 
Liverpool had cost him only $4-10. He kept her death a secret 



106 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE OEIEXT 



from their friends at home and was to take the body along with 
him to his home as he returned. 

On Sunday, March 1, we steamed up the Bosphorus to the 
Black Sea. only twelve miles away. We were getting so much 
further Forth than we had been in Algiers that the air was pretty 
chilly, especially as a wind was coming down from the Black Sea. 
The connection between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea 
is a kind of combination of sea and great river. The water is 
salt but there is a regular current of four miles and hour from the 
Black Sea to the Mediterranean, giving vent to the waters of the 
Danube and other rivers that flow into the Black Sea. The 
Bosphorus means in Greek "ox bearing" in allusion to the fact 
that at that point Europa was carried across on the back of a bull 
from Asia to Europe. T suppose there can hardly be any doubt 
about this having occurred, as the name Bosphorus is retained to 
this day and Europe was named for that woman — at least in 
religious matters we heard a great many facts demonstrated in 
that way. The story of Mrs. Lot must have been true for there 
is the Dead Sea and the country around it wonderfully salt to this 
day and the story of Joshua making the sun and moon stand still 
must be true, because there are Mount Gilboa and the Valley of 
Ajalon to this day that we saw with our own eyes. 

"Going up to the Black Sea we passed on the European side 
the splendid college that is there, established by Roberts for the 
education of American boys in that country. As the Moltke came 
in sight the college ran up a large American flag and saluted us 
with/ it and the Moltke ran up the American flag and played the 
Star Spangled Banner, amid cheering and waving of handkerchiefs 
from the boat and from the college. Some of us may not feel any 
great enthusiasm for our government when we are at home and see- 
the government doing things that we don't like, but away off there, 
that" far away from home." that big flag and the cheering and all 
that it meant brought the patriotic tears to my eyes. I know 
Socialists and Anarchists who are good and intelligent men and 
women, in manv of the highest duties of life, who talk and write 
like it would be the pride of their lives to destroy the government 
of the United States and T admit that, in taking the oath of" 
allegiance to this government in order to get my passport. I did it 
more because I had to do it than because I wanted to do it. and 
vet I believe that the majority of those who think they want to 
destroy this government would pull off their steamer caps and wave 
them to salute that old Yankee gridiron flag, just as I did when 
they saw it unfurl its stars and stripes to the breeze away off there 



DOG FEXKEL IN THE OEIEXT 



107 



is that strange land, and it was the only thing von could see that 
looked anything like your home. 

"Lives there a man with soul so dead, 
Who never to himself has said, 
My own, my native land \" 

I am not writing this book simply for fun nor solely for; 
money, though each of these is an element in my purpose. I 
rather propose to use the incidents of my voyage to "point a moral 
and adorn a tale." 

An American passport is a blending of high and grand 
political sagacity and urbanity on the one hand, with asinine; 
stupidity and injustice and disloyalty to a fundamental principle of 
this government' on the other, it commended me to the protection, 
of any government to which I might go. after leaving my own and 
allows me only to accept that kindness and justice when I will 
swear by G-od to support the Constitution of the United States. 
That I and every citizen who even temporarily expatriates himself 
should have to declare his allegiance to the United States and do 
this "under the pains and penalties or perjury 7 ' is all right, and 
no good and fair citizen can, or will object to that. But when, 
this right of expatriation is limited, really or only apparently, to 
men who are willing to swear by God. whether that God be the God 
of the Jews and Christians, or some of the gods who are not popular 
in America, and whose official dignity is not emphasized by a 
capital G, many of the most intelligent people of this government 
are insulted and embarrassed and are driven to an expedient which 
to say the least of it, is of doubtful moral propriety, while this 
embargo is not imposed upon preachers and priests and the great 
ignorant masses of our people. Ignorant people and mercenary 
ecclessiastics nearly always believe in the existence of a God and 
are glad of a chance to swear by him, or it. Christian Gods and 
angels are all masculine. The' Bible from Genesis to Eevelation 
makes no mention of any woman ever having gone to heaven. 

Some of the greatest of men intellectually and morally, in all 
ages and places of the world, including America, up to date, have 
not believed, and do not believe in any God ; many more _ are 
doubtful and undecided about it and of those who do believe in a 
God, manv of the verv best and most valuable citizens in this 
government and of the most loyal to it, justly understand that our 
constitution allows no advantage or disadvantage from any belief 
or disbelief of any religion, and however much these good citizens 
may believe in the existence of a God they are opposed to having 
their religious creed made a part of the law of this country, 



108 



DOG- FKNNEL IN THE ORIENT 



and do not want "In God we trust" stamped on our coin and they 
do not want any rights that peculiarly belong to all the people of 
this government limited only to those who are willing to swear, or 
apparently to swear, by God, in order to get the benefit of official 
documents of this government. 

That is perfectly consistent in the English government that 
professes to be an alliance of church and state but absolutely 
inconsistent with the genius of this government that had its origin 
in the unwillingness of its founders, in any way, to ally church and 
state. We want just such a government as was bequeathed to us 
by Jefferson, Paine and Franklin and as was sealed and ratified by 
the blood of Lincoln, none of whom was a Christian, and when it 
gets to be the case that a President of the United States and a 
superannuated Pope at Pome confer as to whether an Irish Catholic 
priest named Ireland shall or shall not wear a red hat, this govern- 
ment is going into driveling idiocy and asininity to say nothing 
of revolution and anarchy and every good and great man and 
woman in America must rise to resent this insult. 

There is not an Irish Catholic citizen of the government 
though he be the most ignorant day laborer on one of the turnpikes 
and railroads, whose rights should not be as zealously and jealously 
guarded by this government as those of our Rockefellers and Van- 
derbilts. or more so, if any difference, because the rich can take care 
of themselves better than" the poor can, but the rights of the grand- 
est ecclesiastic as such, are not to be mentioned on the same day 
with those of the most ignorant Negro who was once a slave and is 
now simply a free citizen of this government. 

As between anarchy and a government controlled by any 
religion I prefer anarchy, because I think no government is better 
than a bad government. But if we are to be governed by any kind 
of a religion I prefer the control of a Sultan, a jolly good fellow 
with a large and varied assortment of wives who without ceremony 
set out nice refreshments for us Cookies to eat and drink, no 
intoxicating liquors being among the drinks, to a skinny old Pope 
who has no wife, and therefore knows nothing of the most elevating 
of all relations and to whom we could only gain access through a 
flunkevism inconsistent with the dignity of an American citizen. 

We went up into the Black Sea simply far enough to get a 
good view of the part of it around the mouth of the Bosphorus, and 
our ship having sailed around a circle in that sea, we came again 
into the Bosphorus and started South and East. 

On Sunday, March 1st, we came to Smyrna, in Asia, the home 
of the Buddhist, the Jewish, the Christian and the Mohammed 
religions. It is a city of 350,000 inhabitants, and is 295 miles 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



109 



from Constantinople. I had often wondered how I would feel if 
I ever realized I was in Asia. A realization of this kind is not so 
vivid as one would imagine before having experienced it, because 
we are brought up to the realization so by degrees. The old joke 
that says "Malaga grapes are very good grapes, but Smyrna figs 
are better,' ' was the first thing that occurred to me on first landing 
in Smyrna. The famous figs were to be seen for sale in various 
places, but there are many things in the town beside figs. It is also 
famous for its rugs. Many of these were exposed for sale, and 
many of them were brought and spread upon the decks of our ships. 
A prominent feature in their commerce is wool, great bales of 
which we saw stacked on the quay almost like we see cotton in some 
of our American marts. 

Our party started out under the lead of guides to see the city 
and it being Sunday we were soon brought to a Christian church. 
The priests were standing and preaching or conducting some kind 
of a religious service with their hats on, and the congregation, 
nearly all men, were packed as thick as they could stand and the 
people were pushing and crowing among each other to get up ' to 
hear and see. At the door was a greai> pile of small candles made 
of wax which each man must carry in. lighted. These little candles 
are called into requisition at many places. If you do not pay for 
them they give them to you or may be the Cooks had paid for our 
candle supply. I never paid for any. I think they stuck them 
down into something soft, like dough, inside. I forget what I did 
with mine. These little candles melt and run down on your 
hands and any accessible part of your wardrobe in a disagreeable 
manner. Of course none of us could understand what they were 
preaching about and we left them in about five minutes, men 
crowding into the places we had vacated as if they thought our 
room was better than our company. 

In Smyrna was the first place I had ever "met up with" the 
camel except as we find him in a circus, or zoological garden. I had 
always supposed that the camel had that melancholy, far-away 
Moses look on him because he was so far. away from home and was 
home sick, but he is born that way and can't get over it. He lets 
his lip hang down until he looks like his last friend on earth is 
dead. In Jerusalem where he does not get anything but rags and 
theology and refuse cauliflower leaves to live on the camel is even 
more unhappy looking than he is in a circus, but in Egypt where 
he gets better grub there are known to have been instances where 
camels looked comparatively cheerful. I think the camel prefers 
the Mohammedan view of theology to any of the others. 

We found them selling "John the Baptist's bread" in many 



110 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIENT 



places in Smyrna and afterward saw it all through the Orient. It 
-is said of John the Baptist that "his meat was locusts and wild 
honey." The "locust" is something like the "honey-shuck" that 
grows on the honey locust tree in Kentucky, and which by a long 
stretch of imagination of a hungry boy is very nearly edible. But 
in the Orient this John the Baptist bread gets to be considerably 
like a piece of hard tack into the making of which has gone an 
element something like black honey or the old-fashioned black 
molasses, and it beats nothing by a long jump to a hungry man. 

We there first saw date trees with the dates on them. They 
grow on a low variety of palm tree, and each date seems to be 
sticking on to the 'end of something like a common broom 
straw. " They would give us dates on our hotel tables sometimes 
fresh and sometimes dried. When thet were fresh and soft the 
Cookies enjoyed them and when they were dry one would sample 
them and say "not up to date; back number," and the balance 
would let them slide. 

One of the most famous things in Smyrna, is the tomb ol 
Polycarp. He is said to have personally known the Apostles of 
Jesus Christ. It is said of him that when at eighty years of age, 
a Eoman emperor gave him his choice between death and 
renouncing the Christian religion he said that Christ had been 
faithful to him for eighty years and that he (Polycarp) would not 
then forsake him (Jesus). 

It's a strange little old grave yard where Polycarp is buried, 
and after a lot of us had climbed an hour or two to get up to it, 
high up on the side of the mountain, and we stood there looking 
at the queer looking things. I suppose it was because I was wicked 
but there kept running through my head "Polly want a cracker?" 
but I did not say it, and do not think a man ought to be held 
responsible for what he thinks. Of course I was sorry for the man 
because he was dead, but I had had nothing to do with his taking 
off and I could not reasonably have expected to find him alive and 
well up there and it didn't seem to me that it was any of my funeral 
and I had enough of up to date things in this life to supply my 
demand for trouble and I did not feel called upon to shed any 
tears because the man was dead, and especially as all the indications 
were that he had gone to heaven. 

Away up on top of that mountain we could see the Acrop/ds. 
it was a' very primitive and rude affair as compared with the 
Acropolis at Athens, but it was interesting because nobody seemed 
to know anything about who built it and when and I was one of 
only a few who persisted in climbing until we got there. It was 
" built of stones about as large as a man could lift, the spaces filled m 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIENT 



111 



with smaller stones and all cemented together. The people of 
those days and in that country had an art of making cement for 
building that seems to be unknown to us in America. I saw a 
piece of that wall that would be equal to a cube of about ten feet 
that had fallen from its original position, a clear fall of about 
twenty-five feet, and there it lay on the ground all the rocks in 
it sticking together just as if it had been one solid rock. The 
walls of the Acropolis enclosed about twenty acres. From that 
height we could see snow on the mountains in the distance that 
■seemed to be perpetual, and many beautiful fields stretched away 
as far as the eye could reach. 

I did not tell you all about Polycarp's tomb. It was made of 
-cement and was built up like a little house with a roof that slanted 
each way from the center. It was about six feet long and three 
feet broad and five feet high up to the top of the roof and on one 
end of the roof was something that stuck up like a chimney and 
around the top of this was wrapped and tied a gay colored piece 
of cloth. I saw things like that carried in funeral processions in 
other places in the Orient. Among the rich these things would be 
draped over with very elegant cloths. There was a little place like 
a window in the gable end of the little tomb, and a lot of pieces of 
colored glass or colored china or pottery of some kind, was in this 
little window like the children were using it for a play house. The 
whole grave yard was about fifteen feet square and it was full of 
tombs or graves the others being smaller than Polycarp's. An old 
man had a little stone house that used the grave yard as a house 
yard. The job of that old man and his family seemed to be to 
take care of that tomb. There was a hook in a tree near one end of 
poor old Polly's tomb, on which hook some of the Cookies con- 
tended that at certain times meat was hung as an offering to the 
dead man, but I think it was more probably a hook on which the 
old keeper hung his meat to keep cool through the night, believing 
that nobody would come in among those graves at night to steal it. 

It is said that St. Luke is buried at Smyrna and that the 
Virgin Mary died near Smyrna. It seems strange that neither 
the Xew Testament nor anybody else knows anything of what 
became of the Virgin Mary. It is a remarkable lack of enterprise 
on the part of the Catholics that some of them have not found the 
bones of the Virgin Mary, especially as they have found the bones 
-of Anne the mother of Mary, and done great good by curing many 
sick people who touched them, to say nothing of the money made 
by exhibiting them. A wrist bone of Anne, the mother of Mary, 
and grandmother of Jesus, was exhibited in Xew York City so that 
thousands and thousands of the devout bowed in reverence before it 



112 



DOG- FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



and much money was brought to the church thereby, and it seems 
to me that if all this could ;be done by a simple turn of the wrist, 
the finding of the entire skeleton of the Virgin Mary would arouse 
to new enthusiasm and piety the whole Christian world and 
certainly the bones of the Virgin Mary must be as well preserved, 
somewhere, as the bones of her mother are. 

It seems strange that nobody knows anything about what ever 
became of the remains of the most important two women of the 
whole human race, Eve and the Virgin Mary. It is because in 
those old countries men have all the management of religious 
matters. 

If women had been in charge of religion in Asia like they 
are in the United States, Eve would have been decently buried 
beside her first husband, Adam, where his remains now repose -in 
Jerusalem, to the everlasting confusion of Darwin and his 
followers, and the grave of the Virgin Mary would be decently 
desiomated, instead of lying there unknown among some of those 
old graves that we tramped over up on the side of that old moun- 
tain near which she died. I think that no Christian doubts that 
the Virgin Mary lived and think certainly all the Christians would 
think the Virgin Mary died, except possibly a few Catholics who 
try to account for the absence of the grave by saying that she 
ascended to heaven, though the Xew Testament has failed to 
mention it. If the Virgin Mary died she certainly was entitled 
to Christian burial. There is no tradition of Mary having been 
buried in Palestine, though we saw there the tomb of Eachel, who 
died 1739 years before Mary was born, the tomb standing there to 
this day, one of the largest buildings in its vicinity and perfectly 
preserved, and daily visited by pilgrims, Jews Christians and 
Mohammedans, from all over the world. Tradition does say that 
Mary died near Smyrna, and there is every reason to suppose she 
was buried near where she died, and I don't see why it is not 
possible that, among all those neglected graves, on that mountain, 
that I walked over, "almost any of which were as old as Polycarp's, 
my unconsecrated heel may not have trodden upon the grave of the 
Virgin Mary. 

Cowper says "God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to 
perform'* 7 and Christians all over the world claim that God selects 
the most unexpected instrumentalities for his purposes, and 
certainly it would be just in keeping with the general run of Bible 
stories for God to use me as the means of finding the grave of the 
Virgin Mary, and if the Catholic don't do it, and do it p. d. q., 
I am in favor of starting, like another Peter the Hermit, a crusade 
of Christian women from Kentucky, backed by plenty of money, 



DOG FENNEL IK THE ORIENT 



113 



to go to Smyrna and hunt for the grave of the Virgin Mary until 
they find it. 

If Christian men can find at least two authenticated and 
authorized graves for Jesus Christ it does look like the Christian 
women ought to find at least one decent one for his mother. 

As it is we have the phenomenon of the grave of a woman who 
is called by the larger and more important part of the Christian 
world, "the mother of God/ 7 probably lying buried in some un- 
known spot on the side of a mountain and the people walking over 
her grave to see the grave of a man whose only distinction is his de- 
vation to that woman's son. 

After our party left that church we went wandering around 
and following the guide looking at the curious things in the city. 
In going through a narrow street Mr. and Mrs. Lee and I were cut 
off from the others and soon found ourselves lost. We thought that 
if we could see the harbor anywhere we could find our way back and 
we reasoned that the streets would all run down hill to the harbor. 
We kept thinking that we would get ourselves located, but we did 
not do so and could not find anybody that could speak English. 

Finally a man at a drug store understood that we were lost and 
called a man from the street to conduct us to the landing place. 
He took us through a long and devious route and finally brought us 
in sight of the Moltke and was paid for his trouble. 

From Smyrna to Beyrout is 640 miles. On that sail we passed 
the island of Rhodes, famous as being the place where the Colossus, 
one of the seven wonders of the world was, and we also passed 
Cyprus, the island where Venus was born from the foam of the sea. 
We also passed Patmos, the island famous as being the place where 
John wrote the book of Revelations. 

On March 3rd I had my first view of Palestine as we were 
coming to Beyrout. There was the land that I had talked about 
and read about and heard about and seen pictures of from the time 
I was a small boy and now here I was at last in sight of the "holy 
land." The sight was thrillingly beautiful, the sun was bright and 
its light fell upon the clouds and the snow capped mountains in the 
distance, like a halo. The sea was calm and the air was delight- 
fully soft and balmy. There were no clouds in the sky except some 
that hung around the mountain forty miles away. That mountain 
was Hermon, the dews of which are so much mentioned in Oriental 
story and poetry. It is 12,000 feet high and its top was above the 
clouds. Beyrout is in a beautiful valley and has a population of 
120,000 people. It is very clean and the plots of grass and beautiful 
green trees through it add greatly to its beauty. Along one side 
of it is a stretch of the same kind of sand that is in the Sahara. I 



114 DOG BEIMEL IX THE OKIEXT 

was anxious to go on that sand, and starting out for a walk through 
the city with two Episcopal preachers, who were very nice and 
cultivated and companionable gentlemen, we three walked a mile 
across that sand. It is very light and perfectly clean. Our shoes 
would sink about half way up in it. It is hard to tell how it got 
there. It is high above the sea. Oranges and canary birds seem to 
be two prominent products of the city. , . 

The Armenian boatmen that came to row us from tne ship 
were all exceedingly clean, and the Armenian dress in the city is 
very handsome. I saw there some of the most remarkable develop- 
ments of the seat of the pants of the men. 

One of the most prominent features of Beyrout is a college 
there conducted by a Dr. Bliss, an American missionary who has 
been there for many years. I met him and was introduced to him, 
and had a long talk with him. He was familiar with the people 
of that country, and knew about their different religions. I asked 
him to oire me his opinion of the moral characters of all the 
different religions represented there, and Ms conclusion was that 
there was no~ difference in their moral characters, and from all I 
could hear from him the morals there were fully as good as the best 

in America. t 

The men and women are quite handsome, and 1 saw some 
remarkable instances of young mothers carrying their infants in 
their arms, the mothers retaining all the beauty and freshness oi 
maidenhood. Nearly all the women wear veils but the veils are so 
thin as not to hide their faces. Camels are much used here. 

On March 4th we came seventy-two miles to Haita. It lias 
5,000 inhabitants and has interesting barracks and picturesque 
windmills of the old style, grinding their wheat The hills are 
beautifully terraced and cultivated. It was the first place that I 
saw palms growing indigenously. There was a long forest of them 
growing out of the sand, and looking just like the pictures in die 
books. They have in their natural sand, the same stiff and artificial 
look that we see in the pictures— very tall and straight and the 
same size all the way up, or rather larger at the top and no leaves 
except those that hang out like an immense umbrella from the 
top A Carmelite monastry on one side of the town is its cniei 
attraction and a beautiful road had recently been built out to it, 
so as to have it ready in time for the Emperor William to drive 
out over it when he was there. 



-CHAPTER IV. 



On Wednesday, March 4th, we came fifty-four miles to Jaffa, 
called in the New Testament Joppa. Joppa is famous as being the 
place where, according to the New Testament, Simon, the tanner, 
lived. It is still more famous as being the place where the whale 
swallowed Jonah. 

I knew that the people who would read this book would be 
more interested to find out what I learned about that whale story 
than about all the modern affairs of that country, and I did all that 
I could to find out about it. That whale story is one of the most 
important things in the whole Bible. Jesus Christ not only recog- 
nizes it in the 1ST. T. as an actual occurrence, but he distinctly 
says that the swallowing of Jonah by the whale, the retaining of 
Jonah in the whale's stomach for three days and finally vomiting 
him up, is a type, or prophecy, of the death, burial and resurrection 
of Jesus Christ, the main feature of the whole Bible. 

The unreasonableness of that story and the absurdity of a 
whale's vomiting up a man as a prophecy of the resurrection of 
Jesus, upon the belief of which the salvation of the whole human 
race depended, has been emphasized by infidels in print and in 
lectures until the Christians do not seem to know what to do with 
that story. Even among newspapers that would not dare to be 
suspected of infidelity, the story of Jonah and the whale is spoken 
of just as flippantly as anybody speaks of the stories of the "Ara- 
bian Nights," or of Baron Munchausen. 

What Mrs. Harrison, wife of the professor of the University 
of Virginia, said about this Jonah story is exactly the right view 
of it. She says that if the Christian people allow the infidels to 
ridicule this Jonah story until Christians themselves all get to 
laughing at it as an absurdity, the infidels having destroyed its 
value as a Bible record will not stop there, but will, then take up 
some other Bible story and ridicule it, until the Christians would 
finally abandon it, and that so it would go from one of these stories 
to another until infidelity would finally overthrow the whole Chris- 
tian religion, and the question for the Christians to consider is 
whether or not it is best to stand by the Jonah and whale story, as 
having been an actual occurrence, and stand the storm of ridicule 



116 DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 

and derision that such a course would bring upon the church at 
this day, or, by some method, explain that it was not an actual 
occurrence, but only a myth or poetic figure, or an error that has 
come into the Bible in some manner, and, by this latter course, 
encourage infidels still further to press their vantage against 
Christianity. Let it be once generally conceded, even by Chris- 
tian people, that the story of Jonah and the whale is not an actual 
truth but simplv the representative of an idea and then the next 
move of the infidel may be to insist that in like manner the resur- 
rection of Jesus Christ from the dead is not an actual occurrence 
but simplv such a prevailing of right over wrong as we express 
by the words -truth crushed to earth will rise again. The x\ew 
Testament says of Jesus that he only spoke in parables and it is 
said that Ms disciples did not understand him m his utterances 
about his resurrection, and it would be an interpretation consistent 
with many other things that he said, to explain that he never 
really meant that his body would resurrect alive, alter he was dead, 
but that the principles for which he had contended would be again 
revived after he was dead, m spite of the opposition he met while 
he was living. 

It was common on the steamer for some one to be selected to 
give a lecture about the distinction of the place we were approach- 
ing We heard from many sources about Joppa. or Jatta being 
the place where Simon the tanner lived, and Cook's handbook, that 
he furnishes any who want it. mentions that Jaffa is the place 
where Simon the tanner lived. I don't think there was anybody m 
the cruise who doubted that there was the person named Simon 
the tanner, mentioned in the New Testament, as having lived in 
Jaffa I think the chances are immensely m favor ot that man s 
having lived there. That he should have done so is perfectly reason- 
able, and there seems to be no reason why anybody would invent 
such a story had it not had good foundation in fact. I think that 
there is hardly any doubt that Simon the tanner lived there, and 
lived bv the seaside as stated in the New Testament. But Cook s 
cruise book says nothing about that being the place where the 
whale swallowed Jonah, and in none of the lectures that we heard 
on the ship did I hear of any man saying anything about Jafta as 
the place where the whale swallowed Jonah. The fact that the sea 
gets to be very rough and dangerous there, with no reason that any- 
body can *ee unless it is some scientist familiar with the facts, may 
have made the navigators of that clay believe it was a place where 
miraculous storms occurred, and the story of throwing Jonah over- 
board, to appease the god that was causing this storm is one that 
may very naturally have arisen there. 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



117 



If the story of Jonah and the whale, as given and explained 
in the Bible, had ever been accepted by any people in that country 
in any considerable numbers, and of the best standing, it would 
seem almost certain that tradition would, to this day, show some 
place on the shore about there, where it would still be understood 
that the whale vomited up Jonah, and if any such place could now 
be found and any tradition pointed to it, as the place where Jonah 
was vomited up, the enterprise of those guides, whose business it is 
to show the wonders of the place, and especially the places men- 
tioned in the Bible, would almost certainly lead them to find that 
place, and excite the admiration of the thousands of Christian 
pilgrims who go there anxious to see anything that goes to support 
the Bible story. But I heard no guide allude to any such place, 
and of the nineteen preachers on the ship I did not hear one make 
any allusion to the story of Jonah and the whale, and their policy 
about it seemed to be that the less said about it the better. 

Where Ninevah, to which Jonah went, was, nobody seemed 
to know. The Bible says it was an "exceedingly great city of three 
days journey.". I could get no more information about the story 
of Jonah and the whale right there on the scene of its alleged 
occurrence than I could have done in Lexington, before starting. 

In Jaffa we saw men carrying water in the skins of goats, the 
common way of carrying water all over the Orient. The skins seem 
to hold about ten gallons each. 

On March 4th, about noon we were at the railroad station at 
Jaffa to take the train for Jerusalem, sixty miles distant. It took 
two trains to carry us. I think this railroad was built there about 
ten years ago. The track is quite narrow and the rails light, and the 
cars are so light that I saw three men pushing one on a level 
almost as fast as men commonly walk, but they are comfortable and 
I think they make twelve or fifteen miles an hour. The engines are 
of the English build and are small with three driving wheels on 
each side. The road is nicely ballasted with stone. 

While we were waiting at the station a fight occurred between 
two Mohammedan big boys. They did not put into it as much 
vigor as they as they do into a fight in Kentucky. A policeman 
ran up to them. He had no club but he had a big leather whip 
and he lashed both of them a few times and then they separated 
and ran. Some St. Louis girls enjoyed the fight very much. These 
St. Louis girls and their mother and some gentlemen with them 
were in a car with me. They seemed, from the diamonds they 
wore to be very wealthy people. 

One would imagine that on a tour of this kind knowing that 
we had gotten within a few hours travel to Jerusalem, all culti- 



118 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



vated people, especially Christians, would want to be on the out- 
look for everything on each side of the road; but the mother, a 
very intelligent looking lady, fixed herself for a sleep and slept an 
hour or more and then the party got out a deck and played cards 
until they got tired of it. 

The lady who had said in the carriage at Constantinople that 
she wished she had brought a bottle of whisky, put herself under 
my care on the train, and was very kind and entertaining and 
seemed to be a good woman. It is not a safe plan to make up your 
mind about people just from your first impressions of them. While 
it sounded very coarse to hear a lady say, under such circum- 
stances, that she wished she had a bottle of whisky, it showed she 
was a woman who had the candor to say what she thought and 
there is always hope for a woman or a man of that kind. 

I saw a large lot of cross ties for that road that were of iron 
and suppose they were all iron but the ties were so covered with 
the ballasting that I cannot remember to have seen them. Olives 
and grapes and palms and oranges were growing all along on both 
sides of the road for about half the distance to Jerusalem which 
is over rich cultivating soil and the trees were as full of oranges as 
they could hang, all ripe, and of the finest quality. Along the 
railroad there was a combination of the old and new styles of 
fencing, partly of cactus and partly of wire. The first point of 
Biblical interest that we came to was the tomb of the daughter of 
Dorcas. Docas is mentioned in the New Testament as having 
been a friend and assistant of Paul, and she seems to have been 
the founder of church sewing societies that are called Dorcas 
societies to this clay. Whether that tomb is what it is said to be or 
not it is a place of importance. The woman who is said to be 
buried there derives her importance from the fact that she was a 
daughter of a woman who was a friend of Paul, and the tomb there 
shows a disposition in the Christians of that country to perpetuate 
the memory of a woman who was distinguished among them 
and loved by them. I suppose there is hardly, any doubt that 
there was such a woman as Dorcas and that she was a friend 
of Paul who was a champion of the Christian religion. If then 
those Christians took such pains to preserve the grave of a 
daughter of Dorcas how does it happen that no pains were 
taken to preserve the grave of the Virgin Mary, if the Chris- 
tians of those days regarded her anything like the Christians 
of these days do. The Virgin Mary, to the whole Catholic church 
is a name " more sacred now than the name of God or J esus. 
According to the New Testament she had at least seven children 
and may "have had that many more, and the brothers of Jesus did 



DOG FENNEL I^ T THE OEIENT 



119 



not believe there was anything supernatural about him. If his 
mother thought he was sup ernatur ally born she had either failed 
to tell her other sons so, or if she did tell them so, they did not 
believe her. The absence of any tomb of the Virgin Mary, or of 
any account of her death can "only be reasonably explained on 
the supposition that she was not even regarded as of as much 
importance by those who know her, as Dorcas was by the people 
who knew Dorcas. 

Along that first half of the route to Jerusalem there was a 
beautifully cultivated country that had the most nourishing crops 
of wheat and other small grain, and there were many pretty homes. 
There were fine sheep and cattle. Some of the towns were strange 
looking to us, one feature of them being that there was pretty 
green grass growing all over the tops of the houses. 

The plowing was nearly all being done by camels, one camel 
being hitched to each plow, though in some instances a donkey and 
an ox would be hitched together to plow. 

We came to the place where Samson is said to have caught 
the three hundred foxes and tied their tails together with a brand 
between each pair of foxes and turned them loose in the wheat 
fields of the Philistines to burn them. I looked at the country 
and took in the situation the best I could. It seemed to be a 
splendid place for wheat but did not seem to be a good fox country 
and I thought that if I had the job of burning the wheat of the 
Philistines I could have done it sooner and easier by taking a 
good torch in my own hand than by the plan that Samson used. 

We came to a number of villages where the houses were all 
made of sod. Most of them had only one room each. Some were 
square and some were shaped like a haystack and about as large 
as a haystack. They had no chimneys but holes in the tops for 
the smoke to come out of. Sometimes these houses are destroyed 
by heavy rains. There were many varieties of wild flowers, among 
them being one variety that many of the party supposed to be what 
Jesus alluded to as "the lilies of the field." We saw millions of 
these They were, in appearance, a kind of a combination ot tulip 
and poppy "and were deep red. Afterward we came to beds of 
flowers that were not in bloom that were like a combination ot 
our tulips and lilies of the valley, and others thought those were 
the lilies of the field to which Jesus alluded. 

There was, running along by the railroad a nice, level macad- 
amized road with a telegraph running along the side. 

We saw Eamleh where Joseph of Arimathea lived. I cannot 
recall its appearance, but am under the impression that it was a 
pretty village, and the comitrv around there is fine. It is said that 



120 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



Napoleon was once there. Joseph may have lived there and may 
have had a tomb in Jerusalem where he buried Jesus. I think it 
quite possible that there was such a man as Joseph of Arimathea, 
and that he may have been a friend, to Jesus and may have buried 
Jesus as stated in the New Testament. Of course I cannot tell, 
from anything I saw while in Palestine, but if my going to Pales- 
tine has had any influence at all upon my understanding of these 
matters I think it has tended to make me believe that there was 
such a man as Joseph of Arimathea and that he was a friend to a 
man named Jesus. 

The masonry on the railroad bridges was beautifully done. 
There was no water in the beds of most of the streams, though 
from their appearance I would say that at times they were bold 
streams. The watering tanks for the engines were well constructed. 
We saw many Turks with big pistols. We saw the valley of Ajalon 
and Mount G-ilboa where Joshua made the sun and moon stand 
still. When the guides announced the place, the St. Louis girls 
looked out of the window and laughed as if they thought it was a 
good joke, and when they laughed the guide laughed too. All of 
the guides in the Holy Land are very accommodating in that 
respect. If they tell a party any of their Bible stories and the 
party laughs at it. the guide will always laugh too, or he will be 
serious if the party takes the Bible story to be true. Sometimes 
some of our party would laugh at a story about some place and 
some of them would take it seriously and the guide would seem 
much embarrassed, because he would not know whether to laugh 
or to look serious, and I always felt sorry for him and helped him 
out the best I could. That was their way of making a living and 
their success depended upon their popularity and it was impossible 
for them to tell what was the popular course to pursue. The guides 
had a great deal of trouble to tell what to say so as to please their 
parties when we got to Jerusalem where the Catholics and the 
Protestants did not agree as to which were the genuine and which 
the bogus places that were exhibited. There were more Protestants 
in the company than there were Catholics and the guides knew 
that, and were inclined to poke some fun at some of the stories 
about the Catholic places, but this would make the Catholics mad, 
and they would resent any sort of a joke about their sacred places. 
Hardlv any of the Protestants would resent any joke about any 
of it, and of course the infidels would not. 

A St. Louis man in alluding to Joshua stopping the sun said 
Joshua was in a hot place and it seemed to him like the sun never 
would go down. 

I took a glance at the sun and it seemed to be doing business 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



12X 



at the same old stand, just like it had done as far back as I could 
recollect it, but of course that was no proof that it had not pro- 
ceeded Unusually in Joshua's day. 

We saw Samson's tomb. It seemed to be built of stone or 
cement, and was a cube of about twelve feet with a hemispherical 
dome on it. It was all by itself away up on top of a mountain and 
looked awfully lonely. He may have requested that he be buried 
up there not only because he would not have so far to go to get to 
heaven when resurrection day came, but also because he wanted to 
get as far away from his wife as possible. 

In most cases of unpleasantness between a man and his wife I 
think the man is wrong, but in Samson's family trouble I think 
his wife was to blame. 

We noticed that all the women were tatooed — some with blue 
pigments some with reel and some with both, but I think the blue 
was the more popular. The designs of the tatooing were generally 
artistic and did not disfigure them. In fact when the girl was real 
pretty I enjoyed looking at her tattooing. The Cookies girls sampled 
nearly everything they saw the women doing in all the places we 
went, but they drew the line at tattooing. The trouble about 
tattooing, as a fashion, is that it can't be changed. Oriental 
fashions never change, they are the same yesterday, today and 
forever, but the American woman continually hones to ring the 
changes on style. I am doubtful, therefore, whether the American 
girl will ever consent to have the pigment put into her face, but 
I saw a number of our Cookie girls looking at those Palestine 
girls, with the stars and flowers and cabalistic characters over 
their faces that looked like they might be verses from the Koran, 
and, some of these days, some Yankee is going to make him a 
barrel of money by making a tattooing just like that in Palestine 
except that there will be a process for taking it off when desired, 
and the American girl will bloom out with crescents and the "stars 
and stripes," and national emblems and Maltese crosses and extracts 
from her favorite poets distributed around over her face to beat 
the band, or Palestine either, if these Cookie crusades are kept up ; 
for no plucky Yankee girl is going to let any heathen woman beat 
her at anything that strikingly calls attention to a pretty face. It 
had spread all over the country that our large party was coming 
and the women were out in their best bib and tucker to see us. 
They have black eyes and black hair and olive complexions — 
probably because they live on olives — and they are strong and 
healthy. All this was in the Plains of Sharon, a delightful 
country to live in. I looked to find any of the famous rose of Sharon 



122 



DOG- FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



but if they Were there, it was probably not time for them to be 
in bloom. 

When we are about half way from Jaffa to Jerusalem the 
country changes from this beautiful lovely plain of Sharon into a 
wild, mountainous region, where it seems that in one age of the 
world volcanoes and earthquakes held high carnival and left every 
thing in a condition of demolition that is certainly interesting to 
the geologist and admirer of natural scenery, but leaves it a place 
where hardly anything can live except big. black goats that eat the 
scattering herbage and men who spend their lives climbing around 
over these rocks to eat the goat in turn. 

There is a strange verse in the Bible. Judges 1.19 that says 
"And the Lord was with Judah: and he drove out the inhabitants 
of the mountains, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the 
valley, because thev had chariots of iron/** 

It is a mighty thin story that the Lord could not whip a man 
because the man had a chariot of iron. I can easily imgaine how 
an infidel would take pleasure in reading that verse and laughing 
at it but I cannot understand how a Christian who is never so 
happy a- when he is calling God's attention to his own omnipo- 
tence or almio-htiness. and who reads in the New Testament that 
"with God all things are possible/ 5 can then have the cheek to 
read with any forbearance, that God. with a big army to help him 
could not clean out an army of Canaanites because thev had 
"chariots of iron." when there is not a preacher m America who 
doe* not believe or pretend to believe, that the Lord could clean out 
the British at Gibralta. before you could bat your eyes, if he wanted 

° No • there is an explanation of that phenomenon that is very 
easy to to a man of common sense who goes to Palestine today and 
uses his brains. . . 

I like the Jews of today, thev are among my best inencls 
-Millions of people can stand adversity to every one that can stand 
prosperity. The Jew of to-dav who has abandoned the land and 
the relioion of his ancestors is the finest citizen in our land, but a 
viler set of thieves and murderers and rapists never lived than the 
Jew* who claimed that thev came from Egypt where they had been 
slaves for 100 years, or 130 years, according to the conflicting 
Bible accounts, under the express direction of God to rob the 
Canaanites of their country, when the Canaanites were staying at 
home and attending to their own business and interfering witb 
nobodv else. 

The Canaanites" management of the Jews was the most suc- 
cessful piece of military strategy known to history. 



DOG FENNEL IS THE OKIENT 



123 



The Canaanites had found out. that the mountains of Judea 
were not fit for anything on earth to live in except goats and foxes 
and the Canaanites were glad to get out of those mountains ; so in 
their fights to defend themselves against the Jews they let the 
Jews capture the mountains of Judea and with their "chariots 
of iron" kept the Jews out of the beautiful plains of Sharon. The 
result of the "chariot of iron" scheme is that the Jew in Jerusalem 
today is a miserable old fool, sticking nails in the cracks of the old 
walls of Jerusalem, and whining and wailing over those old rucks 
and chanting out a lot of religious rot about the departed glory of 
Jerusalem, while the Canaanite and his family, all Mohammedans, 
are as jolly a set as you ever saw, and their pretty girls ready to 
flirt with the Cookie boys, and to give the Cookie girls pointers on 
how to get themselves up to be good looking. That little railroad 
through those mountains is a most ingenious piece of engineering 
and the way that little railroad is turning the searchlight upon 
the true inwardness of Jerusalem, so as to show us the rottenness 
and lies of the whole place, that the Christians have, until recently, 
been able to keep covered up, is the most damaging thing to the 
Christian religion that is now transpiring in the world, and the 
whole world will soon see that what we have been taught was a 
halo of heaven hanging over Jerusalem, was really only a jack-o'- 
lantern, ignis fatuus, that rose from the physical and moral 
corruption and rottenness of the whole infernal town, to-day the 
most despicable sink of iniquity on the earth. The way that little 
railroad meanders along the sides of the streams and mountains 
and bores a tunnel through the mountain when there is no oilier 
alternative, is interesting to a civil engineer, or to any railroad 
man, but it gets vthere, Eli, all the same. 

As we get nearer to Jerusalem some of these hills are terraced 
so as to have little gardens on theme, but they estimate that it 
■costs $900 to terrace a single acre so as to make it available as a 
garden or farm. An average size garden is about a quarter of au 
acre. Nothing seems to grow there naturally except olive trees. 
Jesus said "the foxes have holes," and these holes are there yet 
hut between the unpleasant tradition about how Samson treated 
them and the absence of provisions there, I think the foxes have 
all migrated to some place where the goose crop is better. 

We saw up on a mountain side, the town of Petrca. The 
whole town is about as big as a square in an American town, but 
its Greek name, meaning rock, is very appropriate ; it is all built of 
stone and built on a rock. 

The distinction of this place is that it is where Herod the 
Great killed 800,000 Jews in one day, and history does not say it 



124 



DOG- FEXXEL IX THE OKIEXT 



was a very good clay for killing Jews either. If he killed them 
all in that town and had them all there at once he must have piled 
dead Jews up as high over the whole town, the houses of which are 
all one-story, as the ashes covered over Pompeii. Still I do 
not like to doubt the statements of history, being a historian 
myself, and especially of history in Palestine, so that it may be 
possible that as Herod the Great killed all those Jews, their dead 
bodies rolled down the mountain into the valley below. If any 
good Christian person objects to the number ox Jews killed there, 
that day. at Petrea, as having been too large, as a proposition either 
in mathematics or morals, this story may possibly be reduced so 
as to gain universal acceptance. A little matter of a million or 
two in giving an account of the number of: people killed as the 
result of a difference of opinion upon a religious issue, in any one 
of those Oriental countries, does not cut much ice. any way. and 
can easily be adjusted to current demands in statistics. 

A St. Louis man uuon bearing this statement from the guide 
said "Good for Hero:"! That St. Louis wan had probably gone 
up against some Jew in a business transaction, ac <o\\w time, and 
had gotten the hot end of it. 

We saw around that place many of those sheep that have the 
big tails. Why a beaver should have his bio- tail to plaster mud 
with is plain, and why a kangaroo should have his big tail to use 
in jumping is plain, and why a frog should not have any tail, 
because he does not need it to keer> the Hies on: himself, is plain, 
but as a. naturalist accuse .aned h. the tads worn by sheep in 
Kentuckv, I cannot see vvhat nature w is trying 10 do when she 
stuck those enormous tails on tho<e sheep. The argument from 
design and "the eternal atness i\ 'ch-n^V ha- long been a favorite 
one "among theologians, and I wwh ^ome r.f them would explain 
why it is that in a wagging match between a Palestine sheep and his 
tail, the tail, fully half the time, can wag the sheer. It may 
though be a teaching from nature, that the political doctrine of 
reciprocitv is right. It is not a good thing for one side in any 
issue to be allowed to do all the wagging. May it not be that one 
of these big tailed Palestine sheep would be a good emblem for 
the Socialists? 

We also saw the place where Philip baptized the Ethiopian 
as recorded in the eighth chapter of Acts. When I was a cleric 
and believed that the largest possible amount of water should be 
used in baptizing, and even then doubted its rflicacy unless soap 
was used with it, I laid great stress upon this story of Philip 
baptizing that man. or what was left of a man. as showing that 
Philip souzed the man under, and it knocked me out no little 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



125 



when some of the leading men in my own sent admitted in the 
light of higher criticism, that that whole chapter was an interpola- 
tion into the New Testament. It is strange on top of all of this 
that I cannot now recall whether the amount of water at 11ns 
famous place favored the mode of baptism by sprinkling or by 
immersion, but I hope to make a theological straddle that will gain 
me friends from each side, by saying that, so Car as I can now 
recall, the amount of water there sometimes is enough to drown 
the Ethiopian and Philip and his chariot horses too, and at other 
times not more than is necessary to baptize with the least mo iicum 
of water that is claimed to be essential by the daintiest of 
sprinklers. If I had been able to steer between every Scylla and 
Charybdis in theology as I have now done in this instance, I 
would have made my barrel of money and would, beside, have 
been a venerated clergyman to this day. 

About five o'clock in the evening — I use the wocd evening 
always as we do in Kentucky — we came in sight of Jerusalem, 
and I thought of Mark Twain's man, "Grimes," who lifted up 
his eyes and wept when he saw Jerusalem, as they first saw it when 
Mark went there on a donkey as all had to do in t'hx>e days. I 
shall never forget "Grimes' " expansive handkerchief and Grimes' 
attitude as he stood after having gotten off his donkey so as to be 
able to lift up his eyes, without the donkey's being able to take any 
advantage of the rider's temporary inattention, and so as to give 
the tears the fullest and freest opportunity to fall upon the sacred 
soil, or rather, the sacred rocks. 

I lifted up my eyes and bi-focals when I first saw Jerusalem, 
for the town was away up on a hill, but I did not weep. I felt 
more like weeping after I had sampled that town for a few days. 

I was greatly surprised by my first view of Jerusalem. I had 
had intimations of its true inwardness, and had anticipated, as 
far as any man well can do, without personally seeing it, the real 
facts in the case of that town. But on my first view of 
Jerusalem I could hardly believe my own eyes, and determined 
then and there, to write in this book that the city of Jerusalem 
had been more defamed and misrepresented than any town on 
earth, and I determined to skin alive the liars, infidel or Christian, 
who had so ridiculed the appearance of the town. There was 
spread out before my eyes, in an enchanting panorama, a large 
array of most beautiful and clean buildings, all having an up-to- 
date and luxurious appearance, and it really looked like the "new 
Jerusalem" that I had heard about all my life. The sequel showed 
that it really was the "new Jerusalem" lately built, and being 
outside the walls of the Jerusalem of history and the Bible, and 



126 



DOG EEXXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



that I had not seen the real Jerusalem, of David and Solomon and 
Jesus Christ that was inside the walls. 

We got in the carriages at the railway station and started up 
the hill about a half mile to the real Jerusalem of the Bible. We 
came up to the wall, at one of the great gates near which still 
stands the tower of David. The gate and walls and tower are, 
even for this day, formidable looking structures, the tower being 
occupied as a forteress by the Mohammedan soldiers now, and 
from the top of it, at six " o'clock, I saw and heard the flash and 
report of heavy cannon firing as a signal to the soldiery. 

The tower of David which is probably the strongest one about 
the city is about fifty feet high and is in good preservation. It is 
built of large stones and has a ditch around it. the ditch being 
shallower now than it originally was from its being filled in with 
refuse and debris for centuries. The preservation of these walls 
is astonishing. Thev do not seem, however, to be relied on very 
much by the" Turkish soldiers as a means of defense, because 
houses are so built up to the walls, on either side, in some places, 
that an enemv might avail themselves of these houses to scale 1 lie 
walls. I suppose these walls, as they stand now, are thirty feet 
high, from the level of the land around them, and that anciently 
the ditch that is now there was ten or fifteen feet deep and thirty 
feet wide, so that an enemv would have had to cross this ditcn 
to get to the walls. I could not tell from the appearance whether 
or not that ditch had ever been rilled with water. 

When we got inside the walls there was a great change from 
the appearance of the town outside the walls. The town outside 
is occupied bv the missionaries and others who are sent there from 
all over the " Christian world to Christianize the people of that 
country. Those missionaries who live in the part of Jerusalem 
outside of the walls, live in great luxury and elegance, but the 
town thev are paid to go there and benefit is probably without a 
single exception the most miserable city in the world. I saw very 
elegant public institutions that were said to be charitable ones, for 
the" lepers and those variously afflicted, among the buildings out- 
ride of the walls. I never went to see any of them, but heard 
favorable reports of them from Cookies who visited them but if 
there ever was any more misery in that town, physically and 
morally, and religiously than it is now, I can't see where they could 
have stored it away, for certainly now it seems just as full ot all 
kinds of woes that humanity is heir to, as a sardine can is lull 
of sardines, or as an egg is of meat, to be Shakespearean. Our 
carriages disembarked us in a little narrow, rough stone covered 
street "on which were no foot walks, with ancient looking shops 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



127 



and dwellings on either side, and we started on foot to our hotels, 
the narrow street got still narrower and twisted about in curves 
and angles, being about eight or ten feet wide, and without any 
arrangement for lighting and all the time going down a hill. 
Sometimes the streets would slant and sometimes there would 
be steps. Sometimes these steps would be like ordinary stair 
steps all in stone, and sometimes you would come to a step only 
every ten or twelve feet. The rocks in the streets were slippery, 
apparently having been worn so by the sand that had stuck to the 
bare feet of the people who had been walking on those stones ever 
since old David and Solomon had helped to polish these same rocks 
with the sand on their feet. 

I do not know whether or not there ever was a man who lived 
in Jerusalem who made even a foundation for the story about 
Jesus Christ, I am rather inclined to think there was some such 
man, and I think it almost certain that his only clothing was one 
piece of cloth that was not on familiar terms with any first-class 
laundry, and that he had hunks of mud between his toes that would 
have surprised even the Kentucky country school boy of my young 
days, and sand on his feet that helped to polish some of those 
very same rocks that we Cookies were sliding over in the dark on 
the way to our hotels. 

Finally we came to the first of the two hotels to which we 
had been assigned, mine being the first one, and called the "Casa 
Nova," but I think not regarded as so good a hotel as the "Grand," 
to which other of the Cookies were sent. The entrance to my 
hotel was simply a door in a wall, that you would hardly have 
suspected of leading into a hotel. It is called a hospice, and was 
built probably within the last twenty-five years, and is intended 
to combine, so it is alleged, the qualities of a hotel and of a 
charitable institution, it being said that they would give to any 
pilgrim who came to Jerusalem, without money, entertainment 
for three days, but if there were any people there who did not 
have money and plenty of it, except me, I did not see them and I 
was on the lookout for them. 

The Casa Nova is built of stone and marble and stucco, and is 
clean, but from the lack of any kind of arrangement for fire, 
except a stove gotten up on the "Colonel Mulberry Sellers" plan, 
with a coal oil lamp in it sliming through a piece of red glass made 
to look like it was red hot, the whole hotel was so cold and 
cheerless, in the damp weather that we were there, that keeping 
warm in that hotel, when out of our beds, could only be done by 
our so huddling together in the salon, around those "tend-like" 
stoves that we warmed each other, a scheme that was not so awful 



128 



DOG FENNEL IX THE OEIEXT 



"bad for me. for I made it a point never to stop until I got right 
jam up by some pretty woman, and I so publicly announced that as 
my plan for keeping warm that a half dozen women at a time 
would offer me places to sit. The Grand hotel was finer 
'externally than ours, and I suppose internally though I did not 
go into it. The Grand, like the house of Dives, the gentleman 
who went to hell, is built on both sides of the street and arches 
over the street, the town being so constructed that when a house 
wants to get bigger than its neighbors it has to get on both sides 
of a street and over the street also at the same time. 

Any shortage in fire, in our hotel was abundantly com- 
pensated for by the prettiest and coolest looking, long beautiful 
^white lace curtains, and white lace lied curtains that I ever saw, 
the idea of the proprietors seeming to be to show us that it was 
not true that they did not have fire because they did not have 
money to burn. 'There were religious frescoes all over the walls 
.and ceilings in an abundance to gratify the taste of the most pious 
of any of us, the pictures of Jesus representing him as a curly 
headed dude in a fancy ball costume just like they do in the 
-stained glass windows * of the churches in Borne, New York, 
"Lexington and other cities of such world-wide fame. 

Our hotel was five stories high. They call a story of a house 
a -piano."' How they get onto that was too much for me. The 
•sleeping in Jerusalem is pretty good, but they have a variety of 
cats there, with flat tails like a squirrel that get into heated 
theological arguments, along about midnight. Their discussions 
are conducted in Latin or Arabic, or Hebrew, so that I could not 
exactly get the run of the argument, but they seem to be given 
to great prof anity. The stairway leads up on top of the hotel, 
;and that was the most pleasant part of the inside Jerusalem that 
I visited and hell being the nicest part of outside Jerusalem that 
I visited. The walk on top of that hotel and the view from there 
made it the most delightful place I saw inside the Avail. Up on 
the roof the beggars cannot get to you to beg for buksheesh as thev 
call it in Jerusalem, or baksheesh as they call it in Cairo. 

I don't wonder that Peter went up on top of the house to 
pray. If a man would shut his eyes and clasp his hands together, 
on the street in Jerusalem, long enough to say "Now I lay me 
down to sleep,*' he would not have anything in his pockets when 
he got through. No wonder that the injunction was "watch and 
pray," coming from one who knew those fellows. It's in J erusalem 
though, just as it is in Kentucky and all Christian countries: the 
biggest' thieves all move in the finest society. 

I had long heard of Canaan as a land flowing with milk and 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT i 29 

honey. I love both and was anxious to sample them Jnmv 
gomg-on sixty- Slx years I have gone np against the business eMs 
of some thousands of bees to get honey, including that brand of 
the artxele made by "humbler" bees. I did not Vd streams o 

enmXto m rl r r nmg ' h ° ° f mountains big 

enough to run a saw mill as my Sunday school instruction had 

tell whether the milk was from cows or goats, but to any man 
who had ever fraternized with a William goat in his young dZ 
there was no doubt as to the maternity of that Jerusa em butter 
and the Cookies all said that naturaly the Billy goat Zou ft 
the father of all butters. It was good all the saml I love any 
kind of milk whether of a cocoanut or the milk of human kind- 
ness, and I would sample some out of a whale if I had a chance 
and while the Jerusalem milk, cow or goat or whatever i was' 
was not up to the Blue Grass product, I did not k ck aboul i t 
The honey was almost black and did not taste any more like 
American honey than if the two were no kin, but it was splendid 
and I enjoyed it immensely. spienaia 

ff otte?t77 ang 7 ent ? f t ? 6 itenerap y was such that after having 
gotten to Jerusalem about sun-down on March 4th we should 

March th mght T d ! ^ immedia tely after breakfast on 

fnWst ll a nde r tside ° f th e «ty to see various points of 

w ff /r? 1 ° ne bemg Bethleh «»h about seven miles 
ot all the Cookies, men and women, to get choice seats and all 
other advantages m them, though there was room provided for 

4 t Tlle r , f 1 act i tha 1 t we were m the midst of the scenes of the life 
ot Jesus Christ who is supposed to have taught the principles of 

elf-samflce did not seem, at all, to influence those who professed 

twt ^ f0U 1 ° W r- t 1 S ot m i' seat U P the driver as was my 
habit through the tour, partly because I could see better from 
there, and partly because I did not have to scramble for that but 
as a general thing I was about as selfish as any of them The 'only 
two persons m the carriage were two men who rode on the back- 
seat, naturally The front seat inside was not very comfortable, 
the tops of all the carriages we used any where' were always 
turned back and only to be raised in case of rain. 

The two men in the same carriage with me were C F 
Sweeny, from Boston, and S. F. Hartman, from Buffalo New 
York. They were both as ugly as the devil, cross as the gable end 
ot a wood horse, didn't know anything about the Bible and no 
great deal about anything else. They were fretting and impatient 
and damned everybody and everything that did not exactly suit 



130 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

them. We had never been thrown together before. Sweeny was 
an Irishman and had a brogue that was a combination of Boston 
and Cork. He said he had been a lawyer, but had retired. I did 
not ask him if he retired because he had made a big lot of money, 
or because he could not make any at the profession. He was about 
fifty vears old. He said he knew, in Boston, my college chum, 
George Abbot James, and knew something of James" brother-in- 
law, Senator Lodge. Sweeny's very generous use of profane 
expletives made me ask him if he was a Christian or an infidel. 
He relented the question quite sternly, and said that he was 
surprised that any intelligent man would ask another intelligent 
man such a question. I told him I thought the question a tair 
one and that it was one that I was willing to answer any time, 
and to anybody, about myself, and that if he did not think it a 
proper question not to answer it. and I turned around and 
resumed my silence beside the driver, who could only talk Arabic 
Finally Sweeny concluded to answer my question and he said 1 
am a Catholic and I am proud of it.- This seems to be a popular 
formula When I afterward asked a Cookie woman who had been 
gambling at Monte Carlo about Iter religious views she said • 1 am 
a Catholic and I am proud of it." 

Hartman then dipped in his oar. and proved to be an 
Episcopalian. In a few minutes he and Sweeny -were going at 
each other like a couple of Kilkenny cats of the Thomas gender. 
I enioved their quarrel very much, and would only drop m a 
word or two. occasionally, 'to stir them up again when they 
seemed to be quieting down a little from exhaustion and m that 
style we passed about four miles out of the seven that took us to 
Bethelehem to see where the "Prince of Peace-' was born. Lacn 
of those two men soon recognized that the other did not know 
anvthino- about the -Bible, and they both recognized that I did 
know about it. and they agreed to have me to go with them m all 
the carriage rides to tell them about things m the Bible, and 
befor we got to Bethlehem they had both subscribed tor this book 
and Sweeny, especially, was one of the best friends I had m the 
whole cruise after that and did all he could to get subscribers for 
this book and did get quite a number of them. 

The first place that we came to of any special interest was a 
pool that they took Solomon to. to wash him, before they annomted 
im Eng of Isarael. I suppose they washed him in this public 
lace because they knew he needed it and were not willing to trust 
im to do it privately. That pool is about 125 feet across and 
300 feet long and when in good order was probably ten feet deep, 
but the walls are now out of repair and it does not hold water well. 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



131 



The pools about J erusalem are not springs, but are made in valleys 
so that, in rains, water runs down the valleys into them. Just 
at the lower end of that pool is a modern bridge across the ravine 
and below that bridge is hell. This is the Valley of Hinnom, called 
in the Greek New Testament, Gehenna, and that is the word that 
J esus and his apostles use, in the New Testament, when they 
allude to the place that Dives went to, and of which Ingersoll said 
"the climate is bad, but the society is good." The theory of the 
Christians is that this Gehenna got to be" the name for hell* because 
anciently, the J ews used it as a dumping ground for dead animals, 
whose bodies were probably burnt there, but I don't believe the 
Jews ever burned any dead animals there, because they would not 
be willing to use their scanty fuel in that way, and would not 
want to destroy the fragrance of a pile of dead camels and donkeys 
and flat-tailed cats. 

Sweeny thought there was another hell after this life, with 
the best appliances for roasting, and said he hoped there was such 
a place and that he was willing to take his share of it, if he did 
not do right, but Hartman did not believe in any hell except the 
one we saw there, and I made the argument on both sides of the 
question to keep them quarreling. In any event the particular 
hell that we saw is now one of the nicest nlaces around Jerusalem. 
Its average width is about three or four hundred feet and it is 
about a half mile long. It has nice olive trees and almond trees 
growing down in it, and some sweet little clean houses and nice 
and happy looking mothers and children in it. 

I hate to say anything- that would tend to remove the 
salutary fear of hell from the minds of my fellow Kentuckians, 
but if there is anything that a Kentuckian does dote on it is blue 
grass, and candor, as a faithful historian, compels me to sav that 
among the occasional spots in the Orient where I saw Kentucky 
blue grass growing — evidently the same stuff that was first 
discovered in Kentucky — was that hell near Jerusalem and born 
and reared and having spent my life on blue grass sod and trained 
in Christian theology as I have been. I must say that the beautiful 
fresh green blue grass that I saw growing all over the bottom of 
hell made it one of the most attractive spots, to me, that I saw.. 
Sweeny looked at it and said "Ain't that beautiful !" 

The next place of special interest that we came to was the 
"well of the star." The whole road though was beautiful, having 
been made in late years principally for the purpose of taking- 
visitors to the famous places to which we were going. Wp met 
long lines of camels, coming into Jerusalem with their loads on 
their backs, their owners sometimes riding them and some times 



139 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

wafting for to this day, the Arab is not fully 'determined in his 
I™ mind as to winch 'is the harder work walking or riding a 
camel I sampled some of it and being a pretty good walker I 
aTrather melined. as between these two modes of locomotion, to 

^^SSSSft* well at which the wise men from 
the Ea wire drinking when they first saw the star that led them 
to Bethlehem In those days, as now in the United States, the 
mm-e^^eemed to be general that wrse men jnst naturally com 
Som the East. Jerusalem then, like Kentucky now. was the 

"wild and woolly west." n 
V cube of stone of about two and a half feet has been men 
to hollow out in it a basin that holds about ten gallons leaving the 

M jTtti, ti« tad bo, «, ..I m m.oh m oritaroo (tar. .« b. 

to gather tli i eiae h ^ Cllt that che rry tree down 

with rocks. George V\ aaim -ion country" m 

been demolished. It was 3^ a ^ u fa , ^ Christmas times, 
rT WrSti. •( (M. i»« old r„o<( fo, . 



DOG- FENNEL IN THE OR TEXT 



133 



distinction and it would have been highly improper for some star 
not to hare done something of this kind and especially in Christmas 
times. Whether that star was Jupiter or Saturn of Mercury or 
Venus or some other star in our planetary system, or one of the 
fixed stars, Syrius or some of those in the Southern Cross that 
would have been specially appropriate, the Bible does not say, but 
certainly it was a star, and those who say it was merely a kind of 
jack-o'-lantern, gotten up for that special occasion, are perverters 
of the sacred text. Whether those wise men "hitched their 
wagon to that star/' or merely "hoofed" it, as M. G-rier Kidder 
inelegantly expressed it, I do not know but that that star acted as 
described in the New Testament is beyond the highest theological 
doubt, for the tub that the wise men drank out of is there to this 
day. It was considerably out of the way for the wise men coming 
from the East to go by Jerusalem to get to Bethlehem, but the 
star that was guiding them was, naturally, one of more than 
ordinary intelligence and appreciated that, sometimes, "the longest 
way round is the shortest way home/' and they may have gotten a 
better road going around by Jerusalem than by going straight to 
Bethelehem. 

Then we came to Eachel's tomb. The tomb is large enough for 
a pretty good family residence and there is a family living in it 
whose job, I suppose, is to take care of the part of the establish- 
ment occupied by Eachel as a means of paying their rent for the 
balance of the tomb. They take Eachel as a "boarder for the balance 
of the house. The part of the family that is living came out to see 
us and I suppose would, for the usual monetary consideration have 
sold us scraps of silk left over from the making of Sachet's wed- 
ding dress. I felt inclined to ask how Eachel was getting along, 
but I could not talk Arab. 

Solomon's pools were at the end of our route. They are in a 
ravine, all three in number, are each about 150 feet by 300, and 
about ten feet deep, are of fine masonary and hold water to this 
day. I could not understand why they were built away off there, 
for there seemed to be no place to which the water could be taken 
by aqueduct and there was no aqueduct. There is a big building- 
right by them that looks like a fort or military barracks. I looked 
at that" building and guessed that its age might range along any- 
where from 100 years ago back to the days of Solomon. I saw a 
lot of donkeys and right pretty girls, all loaded with roots from 
old olive trees for fuel. The girls carried their packs on their 
heads. Many of the camels were loaded with cauliflower, three or 
four times as large as any I ever saw in America. 

Of all the surprising facts in my tour in the Orient the most 



134 



DOG FENNEL IX THE OBIEXT 



surprising is that my memory of Bethlehem has gotten so obscured 
that I cannot clearly recall the place and this is the only place 
of any such interest of which this is true. 

it would seem to me that I would have remembered 
Bethlehem better than almost any place I saw. but while such 
places as Bethany and Jericho are almost as plain to me. as if I 
were now looking at them, by some inexplicable slip of a cog in the 
machinery of my memory, it is almost impossible for me to give 
any satisfactroy account of Bethlehem. Under these circumstances 
it 'is one of those interesting coincidences commonly credited to 
■'•'Kind Providence*" that when I got to this point in writing this 
book. I picked up the issue of May 2. 1903. of the '"Boston 
Investigator " an infidel paper and saw in it the following : 

"The following extract from a letter written by Rev. John 
M. Richmond, of" Ivnoxville. Tennessee, to the Journal and 
Tribune, of that city, who has been traveling in the ff holy land" 
is not complimentary to the place "made sacred by the presence 
of the savior of mankind:" 

" -It was our purpose to go by land through Galilee and 
Samaria to Jerusalem, but after doing the Galilee part we had a 
rain lasting for sixty hours, that made going by carriage and even 
on horseback, through a roadless country, almost impossible, so 
we returned from Nazareth to Haifa in the ship and so came to 
Jaffa and Jerusalem. " -, 

"'This change gave us additional time m Jerusalem ana 
vicinitv. where there" is much to be seem The weather here as 
everywhere, except in Galilee, has been most favorable. It would 
be useless to oi Ye our impressions of this strange, old. historic, 
^cred but now God-forsaken land, in a letter. It is hard to 
realize that this land could ever have enjoyed the light of the 
o-ospel that has so blessed other lands. 

«■ I can only reconcile the situation by the thought that it 
is preserved as an example to all nations of the hell— the national 
hell— that awaits the nations that forget God. 

- The ignorance, filth, superstition, jealousy, hatred, striie 
and suffering are appalling. In the Church of the Nativity at 
Bethlehem and in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre here . at 
Jerusalem. Mohammedan soldiers guard day and night to keep 
the Christian sects from fighting.'" 

"It is evident that Rev. Mr. Richmond will not sing 
•'Jerusalem, my happy home, - with as much spiritual fervor as has 

been his wont." ■ . , 

Mv daughter-in-law, now living in AA ashmgton and formerly 
of Knoxville, had asked me if I did not see Rev. Richmond and 1 



DOG- FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



135 



told her that he was with the Clarks, with whose tour we met fre- 
quently when we were traveling. So long as I am not able to 
recall Bethlehem as plainly as I would like to do, I am glad that 
"another Richmond in the field" came to my assistance. 

It is strange to me that I cannot, from memory, recall the 
fact that Mohammedan soldiers were guarding the birthplace of 
Jesus to keep the Christian from fighting there, as I had not then 
seen the Mohammedan soldiers guarding one of the two alleged 
tombs of Jesus, in Jerusalem, to keep the Christians from fighting 
over it, but I find in my note book that I mention the presence of 
the Mohammedan soldiers at the olace where Jesus was born. 

I will tell you here another interesting fact. I think the 
most effectual way in the world to spoil a good story is to overdo 
it, and 'since I have come to my own plain and simply, but sweet 
and happy home in Kentucky, I can hardly realize how miserable 
things were in Jerusalem, and since I have said the things about 
Jerusalem that I have said about it up to this point in my book, 
I got to thinking about what I have said about the place and had 
almost concluded to mark out many bad things that I have said 
about the place, because I was afraid I had exaggerated ; but seeing 
that Rev. Richmond says, just as hard, things about Jerusalem as 
I have done, I am going to let my statements about the place 
remain just as I have written them. 

Fortunately — fortuna favet bonos — the most salient feature 
about Bethlehem, the actual place of the birth of Jesus, I 
remember. 

I recall that after coming back from Solomon's pools, and 
when we had gotten half way back to Jerusalem we turned orT of 
the finest main road and turned up a steep rough hill on our right 
to go to Bethlehem. I remember some place where all the 
Cookies got out of their carriages and filed up a long flight of 
stone steps about three feet wide, and I think that was at 
Bethlehem. I have a clouded memory of lamps hanging by long- 
chains that I think were in the Church of the Nativity at Bethle- 
hem, but these are so blended with other lamps in churches and 
mosques that I cannot separate them. I remember that about 
that time the old Arab guide who was with us, in trying to 
designate his particular party — there was one guide for each 
twenty or twenty-five — said "We will call our party Mr. Moore's 
party' 7 and this appeared to me to have been said by him not only 
because he was kind to me and wanted to compliment me, but 
because mv long gray hair and beard made me easily distinguish- 
able as a leader of a party, and also because the guide saw that I 
walked fast and kept up with him. and tried to assist him in 



136 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



keeping order, and also because I could tell to them in English 
better than he could, the Bible stories of the places .we were 
seeing. My notes say that there was a chapel there that was used 
in common by the Greek Catholics. Roman Catholics and Syrians, 
and it was these there that the Mohammedans had to watch to 
keep them from fighting. If any of them know any more about the 
Christian religion than anybody else, at Jerusalem, except the 
Jews, they are the Syrians. They and the Jews lived there upon 
the ground where the Christian religion started and knew about 
it from personal experience, while the Roman Catholics. Greek 
Catholics and Protestants only know about it through books and 
priests, as we do. today, in Kentucky. Even the Syrians have as 
much flubdubbery in their worship as the highest of high church 
Episcopacy in America, but the Syrians were a much plainer and 
humbler people than the balance of the gangs there. On some 
special occasions when the Syrians wanted to get up a big revival 
and have what the profane calk in Kentucky, a "distracted 
meeting" they might join in any general melee and kill a. few of 
the Greek and Roman Catholic brethren, but as a general thing 
they were not so given to that mode of religious discussion. 

But the actual hole in the ground in which Jesus was born, 
or is said to have been born — call it what you will : stable, cave, 
cauliflower cellar or potato hole — I remember quite vividly. There 
was a hole in the ground which like many others that we saw of 
the same kind had evidently been chiseled out of the rock by 
persons who seemed to have used a mallet and chisel. The .bottom 
of that hole was about ten feet, measured perpendicularly from 
the surface of the ground around. The approach to that hole, or 
what ever you may call it. was down a slant about as steep as 
ordinary steps, but I cannot recall whether it had any steps or was 
just an inclined plane. I don't think it was very convenient either 
for a Cookie or any other breed of donkey to walk down into it, 
though a Palestine donkey can walk almost any place that a man 
can. unless it is a steep ladder or tight rope. It did not look like 
a good place to keep donkeys in and it was not high enough to take 
a horse in. I saw in Palestine places to put donkeys in that did 
not cost near so much as that place in Bethlehem and that were 
much better in many respects, though supposing the place of the 
'Xativity'" in Bethlehem to be a stable, it was warmer in winter 
and cooler in summer than any stable built on top the ground, and 
was more permanent: in fact almost indestructible, as it is now 
just like it was when Jesus was born in it. if he was born in it. It 
was so dark down in there that we could only see with candles. 

If a Kentucky mule had been down in there, knowing mules 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIEXT 



137 



as I do, I would not have gone down there without a good lantern, 
for fear I might have gone up against the business end of that 
mule and made to "go way back and sit down" in the room on the 
opposite side of the hall. I am not betting. on the absolute accuracy 
of the mathematical statistics I am now giving you. but I depose, 
to the best of my knowledge and belief as follows : That hall was 
about fifteen feet long, six feet high and four feet wide, measured 
from the foot of the steps or inclined plane. At the far end of 
this hall, or three or four feet from its end, on the right as we went 
in, was a room cut into the wall that ran back about six feet, and 
was about four feet wide and five feet high. The floor of that 
room was, I think, about a foot above the floor of the hall. On 
the opposite side there was a similar kind of a room, about the 
same size, but I think a little nearer, the entrance to the cyclone 
cellar, or whatever it was. The one on the left as we went in had 
in the middle of its floor, a brass, many pointed star, about a foot 
in diameter, bolted down to the floor. My judgment at once 
suggested that the brass star was put there to show in which one 
of the two rooms Jesus was born. I saw nothing of any kind, 
"manger" cut in the rock or anything else, to indicate that it had 
ever been used for a stable. It would have been very much cheaper, 
and more permanent, for those people who knew all about working 
in stone, and very little about working in wood, and who hardly 
had any wood to work in, to have made a manger by scooping a 
place in the stone wall, as they did for almost any purpose, in other 
places, than to have made a manger out of wood. If there was 
anvthing there like the manger in which Jesus is said to have 
been "cradled" I did not see" it, and I suppose if one had been 
there the guides would have strained a point, if necessary, to show 
it to us Cookies. 

But "doctors will differ f even doctors of theology. We had 
in there with us at one time, two guides who were rivals as to who 
was managing the party. 

One of the guides was Ephraim Aboosh. He was a white man 
and, consequently, like his illustrious namesake, "Ephraim was 
joined to his idols/' They call it buksheesh in Palestine and 
"almighty dollar" in America. Ephraim is a subscriber for this 
book and I am going to do him fair. He is about twenty-five years 
old and made, to me, the point that he was beto than an Aral) 
guide because he had been converted to Christianity by Moody. 
That statement, to me, was the only instance 1 saw in which 
Ephraim had missed his man. Still I can imagine :h;it a man 
away off in that outlandish country, where Moody is not *nown 
like 1 we know him in America, might have been converted by 



138 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



Moody and not necessarily have been a bad man, but I think that,, 
as a general thing when you find a man in that country who has- 
been converted to any of the purely American brands of Christian- 
ity — among which I do not reckon Roman Catholicism — you may 
count that he is out for the stuff and that his scheme is to get it out 
of American Christians who blow in their money more freely — all 
except me — than anybody else in that country, so common report 
seems to say. 

There is one fact about Ephraim Aboosh, however, for which 
I will give him credit — there is nothing little about me — he was 
the only guide I saw in Palestine who did not claim to have been 
the guide of "Marky Twain," as they all call him, but whether as 
an expression of affection or the only way an Arab can pronounce- 
the first name of his famous soubriquet I do not know. Ephraim 
did not claim to have been a guide for "Marky," but it was probably 
only because he was not born until two or three years after Mark 
had been there, and as Ephraim was dead stuck on a pretty 
Cookie girl named Miss Rosenthal, he was not going to say 
anything that would indicate that he was old enough to have been 
a guide for Mark Twain. 

Ephraim said that the room that had the star in it was the 
one the "wise men 7 ' staid in while they were visiting Joseph and 
Mary and the young stranger on the other side of the hall, and 
that the infant Jesus and his parents staid in the room that did 
not have the star in. Ephraim's idea seemed to be that the star 
alluded to the star that had come along with the "wise men," and 
that if it was not the identical star that they had first seen "in 
the East," that they bad spiked clown to that stone floor to keep 
it from getting back into the sky again, it was, at least, one mod- 
eled after that star, and had been put there to show that that was 
the room in which the wise men staved while visiting the "holy 
family/' 

On the other hand the old Arab who claimed that he was the- 
guide of that party, and that it was "Mr. Moore's party," said that 
Ephraim Aboosh was a young fellow who did not know anything 
about it, while he the Arab — I can't spell his name, and you could 
not pronounce it if I could— said he was an old man and that he 
and his ancestors knew all about it, from way back, and he said the 
room that had the star in it, was the one where Jesus was born, 
and that the star was put there to signify that fact, and that the 
wise men staid in the room that did not have the star in it. In 
either case, if there were more than three wise men that slept in 
either one of those rooms they must have arranged so that they 
would all turn over at once after they went to bed, and if thew 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE OEIEXT 



139 



were as tall as some of those Arabs I saw, their "hoofs" as, Kidder 
would sav, would have stuck out into the hall, if they had not 
shortened themselves a little by getting themselves up like spoons 
or jackknives. 

Ephraim Aboosh asked me to speak a good word for him m 
mv book and I am going to do so. He is good looking and I just 
naturallv have a fellow feeling for that kind of a man. 

The main trouble about him is, that if you have any good 
looking girls in your party — and there are always liable to be 
Kentuckv women in these, parties— Ephraim and the girls will 
get stuck on each other and he will forget to tell you about the 
things that you brought him along to tell you about ; but the girls 
will have more fun out of Ephraim than they would out of the 
whole balance of Jerusalem. So that if you go to Jerusalem to 
have a picnic, as four-fifths of the people do, and all tired of sight 
seeing before they get there, Ephraim is your man ; and he can talk 
better English than any of them. 

There ought to be guides there exclusively for the Eoman 
Catholics and 'then guides for all persons who are not Eoman 
Catholics. Thev have two sets of exhibits there— places where 
Jesus was tried and crucified and buried according to the Eoman 
Catholics and all the other brands of Christians over there, and 
another set of places where Jesus was tried and crucified and 
buried according to the Protestants; and the infidels, as far as- 
the latter take any stock in any of it, agree with the Protestants. 
When the guide, or guides, were showing us the place where Jesus 
was born in Bethlehem, I think there were Protestants who smiled 
almost audibly. I think all Catholics viewed it very solemnly. 

Ephraim' Aboosh seemed to be worried by trying to please 
the Catholics and the Protestants at the same time. It cannot be 

d0ne 'The old Arab who was mv friend was a Mohammedan and 
being a heathen he took all pains to give his accounts as they ap- 
peared to him and without any discrimination between Catholics 
and Protestants or Jews, the religions of none of whom he believed 
in If therefore, you are an American Christian and go to Jeru- 
salem to get information that will confirm you in what you already 
believe get Ephraim Aboosh and tell him, in the beginning whether 
vou are a Protestant or a Catholic, and he will give vou the infor- 
mation that suits vou, and vou will come back wonderfully built up 
in the faith. Ephraim is the man for priests and preachers, but 
Catholic priests and Protestant preachers must not go along to- 
gether with Ephraim for a guide, and expect him to talk to suit 
both parties ; it cannot be done. 



140 



DOG FEISTXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



If you go to Jerusalem for the purpose of simply finding out 
the facts about the place, and the country around there, so far as 
they are known to anybody that lives in Jerusalem, enquire for the 
old Arab, who guided "Mr. Moore's party" in the Cooks' tour of 
1903. 

There is one place in Bethlehem which, strange to say, I can 
recall perfectly plainly, while I cannot recall the church of the Na- 
tivity. It is the place where the Virgin Mary first nursed Jesus; 
that is. gave him his natural rations of milk. You might suppose, 
naturally, that that would be in the same place under the ground 
where Jesus was born, but that seems not to have been the case. 
The house where he first sucked is some distance from the cyclone 
cellar in which he was born. 

Why I can recollect that place any better than other places in 
Bethelehem I cannot tell. I think I was just tired of looking at 
churches and mosques and did not look at the church of the Na- 
tivity enough to remember it. 

The place where the Virgin Mary first suckled Jesus, though, 
I recall very plainly. It was being cared for by a woman, and I 
don't think there was anybody in the place, at that time, except 
us two. The house, and everything in connection with it, seemed 
to be perfectly new and clean, and I remarked that fact to the wo- 
man and asked her how it could be that that new house was the 
place where the Virgin Mary first nursed Jesus. She said that ten 
years ago all of that place had been filled witli dirt and that it had 
all been cleaned out and therefore looked new. If that was true it 
was the most thorough case of house cleaning that I had ever seen. 
I did not tell her that she was lying, but that is what I thought. I 
had recently seen too many old white marble buildings and too 
many new white marble buildings not to be able to tell the differ- 
ence between a white marble house nearly 2,000 years old and one 
not much more than two years old. But that was the most flagrant 
case of fraud, as I understand it, that I saw in Palestine. If some 
fairly honest looking man there had told me that some of those old 
Jews, and especially the women, were the same ones that were walk- 
ing around Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, and remembered to have 
seen Jesus Christ crucified I might have believed it, especially as 
Jesus told one of them, certainly, that he (the Jew) would not die 
until He (Jesus) came to the earth again, and the tradition of 
"the wandering Jew" is still all over Christian lands ; but I am not 
going to believe that that house that that woman showed me, as 
being the one where the Virgin Mary first nursed Jesus, is at least 
1,903 years old. They cleaned it too clean, and will have to put 
back some of the dirt on it that they took off, before that house can 



DOG FENNEL IX THE OKIEXT Ml 

pass as a successful side show for the stable or cave in which Jesus 
was born. 

Of all the places in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher m Jeru- 
salem, that all Christians there, except the handful of Protestants, 
believe to be the very place where Jesus was' tried and crucified and 
buried, none would seem to be older than 500 years and some of 
them probably not more than 200 years, and even that when they 
seem to be trying to "age" them as fast as possible, like they do 
whisky in Kentucky. But Bethlehem takes the cake when, in the 
last ten years, it. opens a brand-splinter new house, as being the 
place where the Virgin Mary first suckled J esus, and beside this tax 
on our faith, place that house at a considerable distance from the 
place in which that first Christmas baby was born. It was Tertul- 
lian, who said "Credo quia impossible." There is another thing 
about Bethlehem that I do remember that I almost wish I had for- 
gotten as its recital as a faithful historian I must make, though, 
under ordinary circumstances, it is not a proper thing to put into 
print. The guides showed us a street, from the end of which on the 
top of a high hill, the guides said we could get a fine view of the 
country around Bethlehem. The guides did not seem inclined to 
lead the party out that street and but few of them seemed inclined 
to go. I always like to go into places that have up the sign "No 
admittance.* 7 That street was about as wide as any of them, and so 
I started out by myself to go to the end of it, and a number of 
ladies followed me. We got there and got back, but, for the nonce, 
we all belonged to the middle-of-the-road party in politics, while 
our religious slogan was "keep in the middle of the King's high- 
way." I suppose there is not, in the whole world, any public street 
in any town that is used as that one is, and that right there where 
Jesus Christ was born. 

I saw the place where Judas Iscariot is said to have hung him- 
self. Great injustice has been done Judas. Jesus Christ selected 
him out of his whole twelve disciples as the best one to carry the 
money of the party, when experience has shown, even in Christam 
circles, that the very hardest kind of a man to find is one who can 
be trusted with money, and there is no intimation m the N. T. 
that Judas ever betrayed his trust as the financial agent of the 
partv Judas, as a faithful follower of Jesus, had reason to believe 
from the teachings of Jesus, that Jesus could, miraculously, "re- 
move himself out of the hands" of any who might want to do him 
harm, so that what is commonly called the "betrayal" of Jesus 
bv Judas would not result unhappily, at all, to Jesus, but might, 
in fact, do good by showing to the people, the miraculous power 
of Jesus. 



142 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



It was wrong in Judas to have taken from the Jews money for 
which Judas must have understood the Jews were not going to get 
anv "valuable consideration.'* in a commercial sense at least, but 
that monev was to belong to Jesns and all the twelve alike, and 
that Judas did not personally want it. at least, one of the sequels 
shows. 

• When the "•betrayal." which was simply telling some parties 
that Jesus was in a certain garden, that we Cookies saw. and where 
Jesus was supposably not hid. resulted in unlrappiness to Jesus, 
Judas was so disappointed by the outcome and so distressed that, 
according to one account he went and hung himself. Certainly 
that does not look like a conscienceless man. Bad men. as a rule, 
are frequently glad to get somebody else hung but they are gener- 
ally verv careful to do all they can to save their own necks. 

I am not going to tell where these accounts are. in the Bible, 
because I want to encourage the reading of the Bible : not merely 
such passages as the clergy select for the people to read, but I want 
the people to read the Bible in its entirety, starting at the begin- 
ning and reading it carefully to the end just as anv other important 
"book should be read. 

Evidently the early Christain writers had it in for Judas and 
must have it that Judas came to a bad end. 

There are among these writers three entirely different ac- 
counts of how Judas came to his death and all of them are of a 
peculiarly distressing kind. Two of these accounts are in the 
canonic New Testament, and one is in the apocryphal New Testa- 
ment. One of the first two says that Judas came and threw down 
the money that the Jews had paid him. at the feet of the high 
priests, and then went and hung himself. The other of these ac- 
counts says that Judas used that money by buying a field with it. 
and then fell down and bursted himself open. The third account 
says that Judas v~as killed by being caught against a gate post by 
an ox-cart. This third killing, however, does not count among 
Christains — or among Protestants, at least — for the book in which 
it is found was rejected from the books read in the Christian 
churches when the present canon of the X. T. was determined. 

But that our present canonic X. T. gives two different ac- 
counts of the death of Judas hardly admits of cavil. The man 
who. of all the men I ever knew, was the greatest credit to the 
Christian religion, was Bev. President Bobert Milligan of Ken- 
tucky University. When, as a young preacher, I went to him to 
get him to help me out of some difficulties I was having in under- 
standing the Bible, he explained to me that Judas hung himself 



DOGr FENNEL IN THE OKIEXT 



143 



.-and that then "the rope broke/'' and he fell over a precipice, and 
hursted open. 

If we assume the inerrancy of the N. T. in the beginning, 
.and then force harmonies of its apparent discrepancies, that ex- 
planation, if it can be said to explain, is probably as good as can be 
made; but if we read the N. T. as we do other books, to determine 
whether or not it is true by the things that are in it, th,. t explana- 
tion sounds greatly strained. 

I am certain that I have the exact idea of President Milligan 
.and almost his exact words when I say that he said "the rope 
broke and he (Judas) fell over a precipice and burst asunder in 
the midst and all his bowels gushed out." 

I used to wonder before I went to the "Holy Land" whether 
or not they would show the place where Judas hung himself, and, 
knowing that President Miliigans explanation of the apparent 
conflict in the accounts of Judas' death was the generally accepted 
one, I was anxious to see whether, if the place is still pointed out, 
there is any precipice there. 

I saw plainly the place that the guide pointed out as being 
the place where Judas hung himself and I carefully surveyed the 
topography of the place. I am almost certain that it was from 
the hill upon which Bethlehem is that I saw the place where Judas 
is said to have hung himself. I have unusually good eyesight and 
frequently astonished the Cookies with my powers of vision. The 
day on which I saw the place where Judas hung himself was per- 
fectly clear and bright and there was nothing to interrupt my 
vision. There was no precipice there or any where near there. 
Our Kentucky mountains are full of precipices over which one 
might accidently fall and kill himself. I am familiar with those 
precipices because I walked much over the Kentucky mountains as 
my only way of traveling when I was a preacher. The place that 
is shown as being the one where Judas hung himself is on the side 
-of a hill or mountain that is not very high, nor very steep, and is 
a gradual slope. It is so nearly entirely of rock that it seems im- 
possible that anything but an olive tree could ever have grown 
there, and olive trees there seem not to grow more than about 
twenty feet high. There is no indication that there ever was any 
house or anything else there upon which a man could hang himself 
except an olive tree, and olive trees are about the size and shape of 
our apple trees, and I think their limbs are tough and not of the 
kind that would be liable to break from a man's hanging himself 
upon one. They would bend before they would break. 

The topography of the place, then, where Judas is said to 
have hanged himself, does not at all sustain the explanation that 



144 



DOG FEXKEL IN" THE OEIEXT 



President Milligan gave me of the apparent conflict in the two 
accounts of the manner of the death of Jndas. 

It is quite possible that there may have been a man there 
named Jesus and that he may have had a disciple named Judas 
who ma} 7 have done something that resulted in the death of Jesus, 
but the statement that Judas hung himself as a consequence of his 
remorse has all the ear-marks of one of the thousands of "pious 
frauds/' that from the beginning of Christianity up to date have 
been practiced and written by Christians to sustain their religion. 

If was at Bethlehem that I saw the picture of John baptizing 
Jesus, the water being hardly deep enough to . cover the feet of 
Jesus. 

We were shown the place where Herod was said to have killed 
2,500 baby boys in trying to kill Jesus, and the place where the 
angel told Joseph to take his wife and child into Egypt, and the 
field where the shepherds saw the angels when Jesus was born. I 
would watch the countenances of the Cookies frequently, when the 
guides would point out these places. The Protestant girls would 
smile, the Catholic women would look very solemn, the Catholic 
men accept it without any hesitancy and the Protestant preachers 
remain noncommittal so far as words went, but I thought their 
countenances indicated that they did not want anybody to believe 
that they believed those stories. I saw Catholics express great 
reverence and worship for these places and heard them speak of 
what they saw as being confirmatory of the Bible, but I never, 
saw or heard any Protestant do either of these. We saw the tomb 
of Jerome, the well of David, and the rock that the prophet Elias 
lived on. 

If Elias was duly sober and wide awake he might have staid 
up on that rock, but if he went to sleep up there he would almost 
certainly have fallen off. 

We passed a place where men were working in a quarry and 
saw that boys about thirteen years old were carrying off, in baskets, 
on their heads, all the dirt and debris from the quarry, and this 
we found to be the case at all quarries and excavations that we saw 
in the Orient, except that in some instances boys and girls both, 
and working together, would do this. All parties were barefooted. 

We saw the tomb of Simeon. In one of these places, I forget 
just where, I saw a large life-sized picture of Cod and Jesus Christ 
and the Holy Ghost in the shape of a white pigeon. God had gray 
hair and a gray beard about a foot long. He was not bald headed, 
as Hebrew patriarchs generally are, but had a good suit of hair. 
He looked like he was about my age, sixty-five, and was fairly well 



DOG- FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



l-±5 



preserved. I thought, really, though it may sound like flattery— to 
him or to me, you may judge— that he looked a good deal like me 
but did not wear spectacles. The style of his dress, however, was 
quite different from mine. Neither of us wore a watch or any 
jewelry. God was dressed a good deal like those people I saw in 
Algiers. He had a red dress and a green sash around him, and was 
barefooted. His feet were clean and he had no corns on his toes 
that I noticed. In some of these instances these pictures have been 
painted by angels and are therefore entirely authentic. 

We saw the place where Abraham offered Isaac and found the 
ram. While this account is confirmed by the fact that there are 
rams around there to this day and those rams have horns, it is true 
that there they do not seem to be the kind of rams that would get 
themselves into "entangling alliances/' and there is now no shrub- 
bery, or vines around there that a ram could get himself caught in. 
Still that ram had to be caught, somehow, and it was just as easy 
for a miracle to make a grape vine there to catch that ram, as it 
was for a miracle to make Jonah's gourd, or Jack's bean stalk 
grow in one night— things about the historical accuracy of which 
there is now no contention. ■ 

But the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, is, of all the holy hum- 
bugs around Jerusalem, the one that takes the cake — in fact walks 
off" with the entire bakery. 

The whole plant and the scoundrels that run it, would have 
made me laugh if they had not made me so mad. I suppose the 
Mohammedan soldiers' in it would not have let me do what I felt 
like doing in there, and if those fellows had had charge of J erusa- 
lem when Jesus cleaned out the temple by kicking out the money 
changers, and kicking over their tables, the Mohammedans would 
have "run him in and, before the police court, would have made him 
answer to the charge of "drunk and disorderly /' but I tell you I 
burned with the ambition of gaining world-wide fame by rushing 
in, through the crowd and kicking the rear elevation of the anat- 
omy of the Patriarch of Jerusalem when I saw the rascal tramping 
around there in his Christian nubdubbery of gold and jewels, when 
old blind and leprous women sat out in the rain with their bare- 
feet in the streams of cold water, shivering like cold wet dogs in 
rags and dirt and ignorance, when those priests inside did not have 
half the sympathy for one of those old women that a Constanti- 
nople Mohammedan has for the meanest of the 200,000 dogs m 
Constantinople. I believe if I had thus kicked any one of the 
leaders of those priests, especially of the Eoman Catholics or of the 
Greek Catholics and then have gotten my old Mohammedan Aral) 
o-uide to state my case to the Mohammedan court, and tell them 



146 



DOG FENNEL N THE ORIENT 



that I am a Prohibitionist and half Mohammedan, anyhow, that 
court would not have done anything to me. 

If Jesus Christ was the sissy that the pictures represent him 
to be, or if he was the vagabond doing no work, but getting cook- 
ing school pies and handouts from anybody that would give them to 
him, or inviting himself to dinner with bankers, as all of which the 
N. T. represents him, I don't want any of him in mine; but if 
he was a big horny-handed carpenter with a number ten foot on 
him, and he did once kick out of the temple such a gang as they 
have there now, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, I am for 
him, by a large majority, myth or no myth. 

I had heard, for years, that a Mohammedan guard stood at 
the tomb of Jesus Christ to keep the Christians from fighting over 
it, and I expected to find that, in reality, there would be one or 
two superannuated Mohammedan policemen there, asleep on their 
beats, after the popular conception of policemen, but what I did 
find was something near one hundred picked Mohammedan soldiers 
with their commanding officer, all standing in fine uniforms and 
with splendid guns and bayonets and swords, standing in military 
"qui vive," around the tomb of Jesus Christ, to keep the Christians 
from fighting over the grave of "the Prince of Peace and yet, in 
spite of all this, about ten years ago, these Christians got to fight- 
ing right at that place, over the "holy fire" which was being handed 
out, by the priests, to them on Easter, and killed more than one 
hundred of each other. Easter preparations .were going on when 
I was there, and those Mohammedan soldiers, knowing that this was 
the time of the year of greatest danger, showed by their looks, that 
they were there for business. If Jesus Christ said "I came not to 
bring peace but a sword" he certainly hit the nail square on the 
head. 

There were four Christian sects all worshiping in that church 
at the same time, each with its enormous crowd of followers, nearly 
all men, and they all had a lot of pow-wow to get off around that 
one of the two tombs of Jesus, and the Mohammedans let each 
gang of them have their show, and go through all their gaits and 
play all of their tricks, but the heathen was mighty particular not 
to let any two of these gangs of Christians get there at the same 
time. 

The Mohammedan didn't believe any of it, and of course did 
not care which got the best of the scrimmage so long as they did 
it inside the pale of law and order, and they were the things he was 
there to see about, and he saw about it. And yet, with all of those 
things there before them, that they saw just as I saw, and as none 
of them will deny, those seventeen Protestant preachers and those 



DOG EEXXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



147 



two Chicago Catholic priests will all come back to America— unfor- 
tunately— and will fill their own pockets full of shekels of the sanc- 
tuary, while they are begging money to send to Palestine to convert 
Mohammedans to Christianity. 

Any Mohammedan in Jerusalem who would turn Christian, 
and was not in a feeble-minded institute, ought to be sent to a 
lunatic asylum just on general '"'prima facie' 7 principles, and with- 
out the usual process "de lunatico inquirendo." 

Of all that gang of 446 Cookies, Christian and infidel, who 
saw these things just as I did, and no one of whom will dare to say 
that aught T am here saying is untrue, I, the poorest one in the lot, 
and poor because I am fool enough to tell the truth, am the only 
one who will come back home and give publicity to what he or she 
saw and heard in Palestine, and neither the Christians nor the 
infidels are going to tell about it, because they are all a set of cow- 
ards who will connive at a monumental lie because they have got 
money and business interests that they do not want to jeopardize 
by teilino- the truth, and if I had had a big lot of money and big 
business Interests the chances are two to one that I never would 
have written this book. But I know that it is true that if I had 
come back to my home, and lied, even when everybody would have 
known it was a lie— by saying that what I had seen m Palestine 
had made me believe that the Christian religion was true this book 
would have brought me considerable money, though only halt as 
interesting as it now is, while, as it is, I will, do all that I expect to 
do if this book pays for itself, and returns to my dear wife the 
$261 that she sold her flock of sheep for, to enable me to take this 

^'What the nature of this "holy fire" is that the Christians got 
to fio-htino- over when they killed over one hundred of each other 
recently, I do not know. It seems to operate like the hell-fire that 
we make, in Kentucky, out of corn and put in barrels and jugs It 
is handed out each Easter, by the priests, from the tomb of Jesus 
Christ, through two holes, one on each side of the big door that 
o-oes into the church, which on that occasion is fastened, and I 
think the fight began by the poor people claiming that the priests 
gave this '"holy fire" to the rich people before they gave it to the 

P ° 0r "l had read in "Innocents Abroad," Mark Twain's account of 
his weeping at the grave of his ancestor, Adam but that there was 
even the faintest pretense of foundation for the story had never 
occurred to me, though I imagined, somewhere out m the country 
around Jerusalem, a & little grave-a sort of inherent Darwinism 
has always made me think of Adam and Eve as small people- 



148 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OBIEXT 



might have been shown by some country bumpkin, to be taken ser- 
iously when some pilgrim was fool enough to pay him to look at 
it. or as a joke on Adam if the party visiting so preferred to con- 
sider it. but it hit me like a brick when, right there in the Church 
of the Holy Sepulcher, the climax of the Christian world, they 
showed me the grave of Adam with exactly the same earnestness 
that they showed me the grave of Jesus, fifty or one hundred feet 
away from it. the priests and guides in charge of the. two shows, 
indicating just as much faith in the genuineness of the grave of 
Adam as they did in the genuineness of the 2,-rave of Jesus Christ, 
but talking as if Adam had gotten them into trouble that it was 
the job of Jesus Christ to get them out of. • 

As we stood meditatively, silently and sadly, around the grave 
of Adam, and looked down upon the mortal remains of the party 
of the first part, who was the father of all of us. and reflected that 
our meeting at the grave of our common ancestor, should make us 
all love each other as members of the same family, even more than 
we did as Cookies in a foreign, land. I suggested to the guide that 
Adam was born in Mesopotamia; some 2,000 miles from Jerusalem 
and that, so far as the Bible intimated, he finished his career as one 
of the first men of the country, in the same country in which he 
had come into existence, and that it did not appear plain to me 
how it happened that Adam came to be buried in Jerusalem, and 
the guide explained to me that an angel had brought the remains 
of Adam from ILesopotaniia where the garden of Eden was and 
had buried them where they were now resting. I suppose that 
angel was the founder of Adam's Express Company. I said it was 
a discrimination against woman, to bring Adam all that distance 
and bury hini here, and leave poor Eve away off' there in a common 
family bone-yard : but there were 286 Cookie women in that gang 
and if thev did not see cause to resent this reflection upon their 
"sect" there was no kick coming to me. and I shut my head on 
that subject. 

Adam is buried under the pavement of the Church of the Holy 
Sepulcher, in Jerusalem, the place where he is buried, being 
marked by a circle of about four feet in diameter, of alternate 
blocks of black and of white marble. In the middle of that circle 
there is a hole about ten inches in diameter. Into that hole there 
is set a piece of marble shaped like the sloping cork stopper of a 
jug, and that sticks up above the pavement about five inches. 

All the authorities in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher say. 
and the guide said to us, that the angel who brought Adam's re- 
mains to be buried there, selected that particular spot of all the 
places in the earth, because that is the exact center of the earth. 



DOG FEXKEL IN" THE OBIEXT 



Boston's claim to being "the hub/' therefore, is in plain disregard 
of plain angelic teaching on this subject. 

According to the Catholics Jesus was crucified in about one 
hundred feet of that grave where Adam is buried, which is near the 
center of the city of Jerusalem. The New Testament says that 
Jesus was crucified outside of the walls of Jerusalem on a mountain 
called Calvary, and that this is true is proven by the fact that that 
mountain is there to this day. But what the Xew Testament says 
cuts no ice with a Catholic unless it agrees with what the Pope 
and the Catholic church say, and those two say that Jesus 
Christ was crucified right there where the Church of the Holy 
Sepulcher stands, and at a place now enclosed by the walls of that 
church. All of the Christian guides there, tell you, that Adam's 
remains were brought there at the time that Jesus was crucified, 
and that Adam, up to that time, had only been an animal and had 
had no spiritual or immortal nature, and they showed us plainly a 
hole down under the point where the cross stood, where the blood of 
Jesus ran doAvn upon the head of Adam and gave to Adam for the 
first time an immortal nature. They all specially said that the 
"head of Adam" had been placed under that hole so that the blood 
could run down upon it, but they did not explain whether the head 
of Adam had been separated from the balance of his mortal re- 
mains, for convenience in transportation, or whether the balance 
of his skeleton, and whatever remained on it, had been taken along 
with the head. Adam's entire outfit, or whatever remained of it, had 
been brought from Mesopotamia and had been put into that grave 
and because the hole under the cross was rather too small to put a 
full sized corpse in, and because it was rather a spooky and dark 
and slippery kind of a hole to be dragging a corpse around in, I got 
the general impression that Adam's head had been taken off, and 
carried to that hole under the cross, and whether they just clumped 
the head back into that round hole or fastened it back onto the 
skeleton with copper wires like they do in the anatomical museum 
at Washington City, or whether they stuck a screw into the back 
part of Adam's skull and screwed it down into the hole in his back- 
bone, where the marrow had been, so as to be easily taken off in case 
Adam's head must again at anytime be brought to the light of day, 
I do not know. 

It seems evident that Eve must have' remained a very 
attractive specimen of a female animal; so that according to the 
highest theological opinion in Jerusalem, the honors are about 
even, in the contention between Mr. Darwin and the Christian as 
to whether our first parents were animals or human beings. 

Whether the remains of Adam were chucked down through 



150 



DOG FENNEL IX THE OEIEXT 



that eight inch hole like coal into a cellar under the pavement, or 
whether he was bent up something like a hoop and buried in a 
round grave four feet in diameter as might seem, from surface 
indication. I do not know and am only going to tell what I know, 
or think I know. 

The space occupied in burying people in old times seems to 
have been very variable. Adam, at most, could have had a hole but 
four feet in diameter while I saw in Egypt a man whose burial 
place had been thirteen acres and they had put all over that space 
a solid pile of stone -±90 feet high, but "its hard to keep a good 
man down.*" and without any assistance from Gabriel and his horn, 
thev had resurrected that man after he had been there 5.142 years, 
and there he was in Cairo with a smile on his face and all right, 
a little "'''necessary wear and tear excepted.** and was continuing 
his nap for another 5.000 years if some of the predictions of the 
Millerites do not come true before the expiration of that time, when 
I suppose that man will rise and go to plunking a harp : for. cer- 
tainly, he has been a quiet and peaceable citizen for a long time. 

The Christian guides told us that the Mohammedans believed 
that when Mohammed came, he pulled out that stopper in 
Adam's grave, and put all the devils in the world down in that 
hole and" stopped them up. but I did not hear from any Moham- 
medans what the Mohammedans had to say on that point, and 
in Jerusalem, anything that a Christian says about a Mohammedan 
must be taken "'cum V an0 salis"— that is. with a barrel of salt 
I heard a man who was walking behind me say to another 
person "There goes a man who loves the church."' I thought he was 
talking about me and supposed it was said about me in irony, but 
several women. I think including Christians and infidels, told me 
that I was the best Christian on the boat and they heard me talk 
just as I am talking here. I do not remember that any man ac- 
cused me of being a Christian. 

The thing that is called the tomb of Jesus in the Church of 
the Holy Sepulcher is a room made of alabaster about thirty feet 
square and about that high that stands on the floor of the church. 
Inside of that room is much that looks like gold and jewels, and I 
think thev are intended to be understood as being such, but I do 
not believe thev are. for if thev were genuine I believe those priests 
would steal them and sell them. Lamps are kept burning there all 
the time. Chromos such as can be bought in America for two or 
three dollars each are hung up over this square building. Down a 
set of steps about ten feet" under that alabaster tomb, or whatever 
it is. there is a little room scooped out in the rock and in that little 
room there is a place about the size of an ordinary man's coffin, 



DOG FEXKEL M THE ORIENT 151 

and in this they say Jesus was laid. The- place does not at all tally 
with the accounts of the tomb of Jesus as given m the X. T. There 
could not reasonably be any sense in the account of "rolling away 
the stone" that is mentioned in the New Testament as having oc- 
curred at the grave of Jesus, if, this place in the Church of the 
Holy Sepulcher is the place, where Jesus was buried, while how the 
stone was rolled awav at the grave outside of the walls at the foot 
of Mt Calvary is remarkably plain, as I will explain to you, when 
I come to an account of it. 

The plain inference is that there was a "garden near the 
place where the X. T. says Jesus was buried. There is no such 
place near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, with every reason 
to suppose there has never been one there in 3,000 years, while 
there is to this day a garden at the alleged tomb of Jesus that is 
outside of the walls and that garden looks like it might have 
been there for 2,000 years. Of course it makes no difference 
to me which is the true grave or which is the false one, or whether 
either of them is the true one or whether there ever was any such 
man as Jesus. I am quite certain that no man, god, or son ot bod, 
ever rose from the dead. 

Common sense would tell any man that that thing built over 
the grave of Jesus in the Chruch of the Holy Sepulcher could not 
have" been built there until after the church was built, because the 
thing is built upon the floor of the church, and the tomb— we will 
call it— could not have staid there exposed to the weather and un- 
covered The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is right down m a 
bottom, and if the place where Jesus is said to have been placed 
there had been there before the house was built over it, I think the 
tomb of Jesus would probably have filled with water, but it is true 
that that idea did not occur to me until I got to his point m writ- 
ins Of course the Church of the Holy Sepulcher could not have 
been built until after Jesus was dead if it was built for a Christian 
church. The first thing that you come to as you come into that 
church is an alabaster slab about eight feet long and four feet 
broad put up on a support of the same material so that it is about a 
foot from the floor. 

I think the whole space occupied by the interior of that chuch 
is about 300 feet square and 100 feet high. That alabaster slab is 
about six inches thick. The people who come m there kneel down 
and kiss that slab, and they say it is the indentieal slab upon which 
Joseph of Arimathea laid the body of Jesus Christ when they were 
preparing the body for burial. I suppose that some of the Cookies 
kissed that slab, but I did not see any of them do it. 

\nv man of any judgment about such matters can see that 



152 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIEXT 



that slali and its supports are made out of alabaster like that thing 
over the tomb is. and that these two things are the only alabaster 
in the building : that they appear to be of the same age. and that 
they hare exactly the same ornamentation on them and there is 
every reason to suppose that the slab and that room over the grave 
were put there at the same time, and by the same workmen, and 
that the room over the grave could not have been put there until 
after the church was built, and that the church could not have been 
built until after Jesus was dead, and that, therefore, that slab could 
not have been the one upon which Jesus was laid to be prepared 
for burial. And yet a lot of unreasoning religious enthusiasts will 
go on from year to year, kissing that alabaster slab which is proba- 
bly not more than 300 years old. If they can, and will, start right 
there in Bethlehem, a brand-splinter new house not more than ten 
years old and successfully exhibit it. as the very house in which 
the Virgin Mary first suckled Jesus, why could they not make these 
same people believe that a slab that was dressed off 300 years ago. 
is the indentical slab upon which Jesus was laid to prepare the 
body for the grave ? 

Three hundred years ago there was no Mark Twain to go over 
there and poke fun at the grave of Adam and other such manifest 
absurdities. 

In the X. T. one of the gospels says that Jesus in carrying 
his cross- to Calvary broke down and that Simon, the Cyrenean, 
took up the cross and carried it on to Calvary. The other gospels — 
I write from memory — say that Jesus carried his own cross, and 
do not mention his breaking down under it. The X. T. mentions 
only one instance of his breaking down or fainting under the 
weight of the cross. The Catholics and the Protestants in Jerusa- 
lem each have fourteen places where they say Jesus broke down 
carrying the cross. The places are by both of these sects called 
"stations.*' The Catholic "stations" are all inside of the Church 
of the Holy Sepulcher. and the "stations** of the Protestants are 
all outside of that church, and these stations of the Protestants 
are all numbered where they Occurred, on the walls along the street 
called "Via Dolorosa.*' that street running out toward Calvary. 
The Catholic stations are all numbered on the wall inside the 
Church of the Holy Sepulcher. and as the place where Jesus was 
tried and the place where he was crucified are both inside of the 
Church of the Holy Sepulcher these fourteen stations can only be a 
few feet apart, say an average of ten feet. 

When I say Catholics I mean Roman Catholics, Greek Catho- 
lics, Syrian Christians and Armenian Christians, the worship of all 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



153 



of whom is like our Roman Catholics, and I mean by the word 
Catholics all Christians that are not Protestants. 

The Catholics have in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, a 
place about twenty-five feet high up on top of which there is, I 
would guess, a flat place about twenty feet square. I do not think 
anybody is allowed to go up there, though I think it possible that 
anybody might go up there who went up on his or her knees and 
possibly pay something for the privilege. 

I forgot to say until I got to this point in my writing that 
when we went down into the place where the tomb of Jesus was 
said to be the door of the place was made so low that when we went 
into the place of the grave we were forced to bow to get in, and 
when I started to come out a man standing near the door, asked me 
please to go out backward. The same kind of a low door, and for 
the purpose of forcing all to bow, was made in the Avail ten feet 
high that is around the garden of Gethsemane, where there could 
be no other motive for having a door not more than four feet high, 
and there was the same request, not quite so polite, to go out of it 
backward. 

I think the Christian caught this idea from the doors into the 
tombs around the pyramids in Egypt which though really abun- 
dantly high for anybody to pass through without stooping are so 
filled up with sand that you have to stoop or even to crawl to get 
into the tombs. 

There are about twenty-five steps to go up onto that place in the 
Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and each step is, of course, about 
one foot high. These steps are about twenty feet long and are of 
a dark colored stone. All the Catholics in Jerusalem say, and all 
Catholics everywhere believe, or profess to believe that those stone 
steps that we saw in that church in Jerusalem are the identical 
steps that Jesus climbed to be crucified on top of that place and 
that he was crucified up on that platform and yet when we got to 
Rome we found the Roman Catholic church there having a flight 
of about twenty or twenty-five steps up which the people were 
going on their knees and saying one prayer on each step and those 
steps are of white marble and they tell you that they are the identi- 
cal steps that Jesus climbed in Jerusalem when he was crucified, 
and they tell you that an angel brought those steps from Jerusalem 
to Rome in one night and put them where they now are, called 
"scala sacra," and I saw at one time seventeen women and two 
men and one boy going up those steps on their knees, and after- 
ward, an infidel named Thomas Hunt, from Kennedy. Ohio, who 
was in our. party, and who is a subscriber for this book went up 
those steps on his knees, as he said just to get to see them. There 



154 DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIENT 

is a picture of Jesus up at the head of those steps in Rome that they 
say the angel painted the night he brought the steps there from 
Jerusalem, and vet the very same Catholics who saw the steps m 
Jerusalem that Jesus went up to he crucified, said these steps that 
they saw in Rome were the same ones that Jesus went up to be 
crucified, and whether any one of those Catholics who went up 
those steps on his knees is a bigger fool than the infidel Hunt who 
went up those steps on his knees, is too hard for me ; give it up : 
ask me something easy. - • .' 

I saw one good thing about that slab that lay there by the side 
of the sepulcher. I saw" a perfectly black Negro man kneel down 
and kiss it and then a white man kneel and kiss it right in the same 
place, and yet I suppose the white man would not kiss the black 

0n6 ' The Bible teaches that God cursed that black man and con- 
demned him to be the slave of the white man. Of course that was 
a lie that the white man told because it suited the white man to 
own the black one. but the fact that their religion had brought the 
black man and the white one close enough together to kiss the same 
blarney stone was the only redeeming feature I saw m the whole 
Church of the Holv Sepulcher. If a right clean stone had just 
been kissed bv some 1 sweet pretty woman I might kiss it m the same 
place or even kiss the woman, but I would not kiss any rock on 
the same place where that Negro had kissed it. or where some men 
that I saw on the Moltke had kissed it. 

The guide showed us there the stone upon which he said the 
ano-el "stood," when he had rolled it away from the sepulcher on 
the morning of the resurrection. The X. T. says the angel "sat 
upon the sione after he had rolled it away. Any man ot good 
judgment who goes out to the tomb in which Joseph of Arimatnea 
put C Je<ms if such a thing ever occurred, and as I think is quite 
possible, and which is the" tomb and the only one about that town 
that at all answers the description of the one m the X. T he will 
see that if angels sat down in those days, as other people do now, 
he never would have sat upon that stone. It is possible that the an- 
o-el with just a few flaps of his wings could have gotten up on that 
stone and it is possible that, by the hardest, if he was only a 
vouno- angel not fullv grown die might have managed to stick up on 
that rock after he had rolled it away, but it is not at all the kind oi 
a rock that a tired angel, or any other tired party would have 
selected to sit on. so as to rest himself. To be candid unless that 
ano-el had practiced in the gymnasium of a Y. M. C. A., or some- 
thmo- of that kind, he could not have sat upon that rock at all. the 
man" who wrote that storv about that angel sitting on that rock 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



155 



that was rolled away from the tomb that Joseph of Arimathea put 
Jesus in, had. evidently, never seen that tomb and did not know 
how it was constructed. 

The rock that was used to close the door of that tomb was a 
rock about five feet in diameter and about a foot thick and was 
shaped like a millstone with no hole through it, though flat on 
either side, and there was a groove in the solid rock into which the 
edge of the round rock fitted and in which it rolled and the door 
that it closed was in a flat perpendicular wall cut in the natural 
stone, so that if an angel had sat upon it there would have been no 
place for his wings to stick out behind him and his legs would have 
hung down in a most ungainly and uncomfortable manner, and, 
altogether, he would have looked more like a circus acrobat than a 
decent gentlemanly angel — there are no female angels you know — 
who being a little tired from rolling the rock had just sat down 
for a minute or two to blow a while before he went on to his next 
job. If you will take the X. T. and read carefully from the four 
gospels about what that angel, or those angels, said and did at that 
sepulcher you will find that the accounts don't tally a little bit — 
that they are all as criss-cross as the gable end of a saw buck. So 
that while I have no objection to the statement that Joseph of 
Arimathea may have put Jesus in that tomb, I must draw the lire 
at the angel part of the story. I am not much on angels, anyway, 
and especially male angels, and still more especially male angels 
with Irish names, like Michael, on them; and I think the fellow 
or fellows, that started out to write that story in the X. T. spoilt 
it by overdoing it, in putting that about the angels in it. I can 
stand the part about those women going there early in the morning, 
because that is all natural and right ; but please don't put any Irish 
male angels in mine when you go to tell me that story. 

I forgot to mention that that big stone stopper that Mohammed 
used to plug up the devils down in Adam's grave, was brought by 
an angel from the garden of Eden. I don't know whether the 
angel got it out of the wall around the garden of Eden or whether 
or not it was a stone that Adam had thrown out in clearing out the 
garden preparatory to planting peas in the early spring, and I don't 
know whether the angel hewed out that stopper and brought it just 
as we saw it there, or whether he only brought the rock in the 
rough and it was dresseed in Jerusalem so as to make that stopper 
Besides the thing that I have already mentioned in that 
Church of the Holy Sepulcher there was the prison in which Jesus 
was put, and the stocks made of stone through which the feet of 
Jesus were put, and then the stocks were fastened, so that he 
could not get away. 



156 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



Remember, please, that these things in the church are not 
models of the things they represent as we see so often m the 
museums and at our world's fair, nor have they been moved from 
any other place and brought there. They are the identical things 
themselves that were connected with the trial and crucifixion ot 
Jesus and they are, today, in exactly the same places where they 
were when Jesus was tried and crucified there. ^ ; 

There is also in there the judgment seat of Christ, the place 
upon which Jesus sat when he was tried or upon which the party sat 
who tried him, I don't know which. There is in that same church, 
the place where Jesus said to John "Behold thy mother also the 
place where the Jews parted his raiment among them when they had 
crucified Jesus. Then there is a dark cavern into which the Jews 
threw the cross after thev had crucified Jesus and covered it all 
over with dirt supposing that it never could be found. It was a 
dark and uncomfortable looking cavern and I do not remember 
that anybody but myself went down into it. It is a place that has 
in it about 'as much space as a room twenty-five feet square and 
twelve feet high. It really did look like it had, at sometime, been 
filled with dirt and rubbish. Up near the roof of that cavern is 
a hole nearly round that goes out through the solid stone into the 
- auditorium of the church. This hole is about five feet long and 
two feet in diameter. At the end of this hole a woman sat, who 
I think was either St. Sophia or St. Helena, and spent days and 
days throwing money into that hole to induce workmen to go into 
that cavern and dig for the cross of Jesus, and m this way she 
finally succeeded in finding it. The two crosses upon which the 
two thieves were crucified were also found at the same time, m that 
place, and there was some way by which the cross of Jesus could 
be told from either of the other two, but I forget how they said it 
was told. What became of that cross does not seem to be known 

It is said that the Catholics have enough "pieces of the true 
cross*' divided around among their churches to make several 
crosses, but the Crusaders all said that the Mohammedans got that 
cross when thev captured Jerusalem, and those Crusaders got the 
whole of Christian Europe into a war with the Mohammedans 
which lasted nearly two hundred years, the purpose of that war 
being to recover that cross from the Mohammedans. But the 
Mohammedans cleaned out the Christians and the Christians never 
claimed to have gotten the cross from them and how the Roman 
Catholics got that cross to divide it around like thev did I cannot 
imagine unless some angel brought it from Jerusalem to Rome, 
some night, as angels were in a habit of doing. _ 

I- think it is a pity that the Catholics split it up instead ot 



DOGr FEXXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



157 



keeping it all in one piece. It would have been an interesting thing 
to stick up in St. Peter's, at Eome. 

I don't know what the Mohammedans would say became of 
that cross, but I guess the Catholic story about it amuses them. 
From a fact in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the shape of 
the cross must have been quite different from what is commonly 
supposed. The upright of the cross instead of being the straight 
beams with four regular edges, like lumber has at this day, must 
have been a round pole about four inches in diameter at the bot- 
tom, and this idea is favored by many things that I saw in Jeru- 
salem. They have had very little wood there at any time since 
Jerusalem was a large city and they used wood a very little and 
that was only a small part of their buildings and their wood was 
about half split out and half hewn out and all in a very rough 
manner. 

I have heard of the Irishman who said a cannon was made 
by taking a straight hole and pouring brass around it. They have 
done something like that in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. 
They have there the hole in which the foot of the cross of Jesus 
was put, and they have brass around the hole. The hole is in the 
solid rock and there is around the hole a flat ring of brass made 
by cutting a disk of about eight inches in diameter out of a plate 
of brass about a half inch thick and then cutting a round hole of 
about four inches in diameter in the center of the disk, that is the 
size of the round hole in the rock, and then fastening the brass 
ring around the hole. Whether that brass ring was around that 
hole when the cross of Jesus was put down into that hole I do not 
know. But I put my hand down into the hole. It is abundantly 
deep to hold a pole that might be put clown in it, but no pole larger 
than four inches in diameter would go down into that hole. It 
is therefore plain then that the people who made that hole into 
which the cross of Jesus went, understood that the upright part 
of the cross was a pole of not more than four inches in diameter 
and this idea is favored by the character of the timber around that 
place and by the custom of the people in using it. The big cross, 
therefore, on the burial lot of the Confederate soldiers in Lexington 
that represents the cross as the round body of a tree, with the bark 
on it, is nearer the style of the cross of Jerusalem in the days of 
Jesus than the common form of the cross. 

Paul speaks of Jesus as having been nailed to "the tree of the 
cross/' and, now supposing that there was such a man as Jesus and 
that he was crucified, as I think was probably so, I am going to tell 
you, almost certainly, what his "cross" was. It was not a cross at 
all, in the sense that one piece of wood was fastened across another. 



a58 DOG F,ENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

but it was a tree with a fork in it, barely big enough to hold up 
the bodTof a man, the main body of the tree not bemg more than 
=W inches in Tameter, and about twelye feet long so that the 
wholThfdy VZ man could be seen from a dW»C* *e 

rfteHoly Sepulcher and put all of those thmgs - rt knew Ih 
^ S^t^XrtTSture of the Virgin JjT ^ 

^tts:^^ 

"""Sk w. were going ™»« » th.t ctar* .»« k«owi«p ft* 
*«' ™ M ™ "to. on. Snnda,, to « tk. 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE OEIENT 



159 



about as high as that we went through to see the grave of Jesus, 
in the church, and all of those doors, except one, were filled with 
statuary stuck in them. One of these doors came out onto a gallery 
about forty feet above the floor of the main room below, and nl] 
of that gallery was packed with men, women and children, looking 
over the balustrade and through it, down at things below. We all 
had to bow to get through that door, when it would have been just 
as easy to make it so that we could walk through it erect. Tile 
faithful are supposed to bow and kiss that slab in the main audi- 
torium, as they come in, and "rank outsiders" are forced to bow 
if they get into that gallery where such are supposed, perhaps, to 
go, though there was nobody to hinder any of us from stopping in 
the room below. But that gallery afforded a better opportunity 
for seeing and hearing than did any other part of the building. 
The people poured through that little door, or hole, coming into 
that galJery just in a solid stream as fast as ihey could get through. 

Most of those beside the Cookies wa^e >vomen and children and 
all said their prayers or whatever the}- were saving — I could not 
understand their language — and went through their performances, 
evidently understanding what the priest was saying. Our guide 
pushed these women and children aside to make room for the 
Cookies and we all, like a set of he and she ruffians, allowed the 
guides to do this without any protest from us, and I, and all the 
rest of us Cookies, crowded in to take the places the guides had. 
pushed the women and children out of. If we had acted, m Lex- 
ington, as we acted there, in Jerusalem, in the church from winch 
all the Christianity of the world started we all ought to have been 
put in the work-house, but T said to myself that for the last fifty 
years I had been trying to get to see that show, and that those wo- 
men and children could get to see it anytime and so, to draw it 
mildly, I went to the very limit that any gentleman could do, and 
remain a gentleman, in order to get to see and hear. 

Standing right by the side of me and saying their prayers, 
were a big boy and a woman. The boy was crowded onto the wo- 
man, and I suppose I helped to do it. The woman hit him and the 
boy hit her, and while they were having the sera,) which ensued I 
got a good position. . I sorter refereed the fight and called it a 
draw, and they went back to saying their prayers. 

I was in the "gold room" in New York City, away back A'onder 
about the time of "black Friday," and I bought tickets for my 
wife and myself for the "Black Crook," at Mblo's Garden, in that 
town, Avhen the Black Crook was at its highest popularity, and I 
know what a crowd of men will do when they want a thing and 
want it bad. I saw those fellows take the sacrament that day in 



160 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

that church and they went for at as if to say "the devil take the 
mar cnui msm—I think the few women got out of the 

5S&™5 Sentias handed out-went tor that thing 
X he thought the deed would get him if he did not get A 
Ther wa s a big fellow with a lot of clothes on him, finer ban any 
vou erer =aw in a circus, that sat up on a big throne and he had 
n 1 o trav on his knees, a half bushel of wafers. The -a^ hose 
neolile scrambled for those wafers was a caution and that fellow 
anded them out with both hands like Barnunrs circus ticket man 
The priests kindly drank all the wine and saved the people .thai 
part of the trouble, for it would have been almost impossible to 
Ce furnished the'wine to that crowd. Priests are great people 
+n Qsr-rifir-e themselves for the good of others. ■■ 
t0 TjorgeonTlpectaele was the procession of the Patnarch of 
Jernsalem and about fifty priests with him. from the altar where 
ii held forth, down the center of the church between lines of 
MohTmedan soldiers, to the Catholic tomb of Jesus and then 
Zand that tomb and then back by another route to the altar 
theTsterted from. Then- costumes were the most gorgeous things 
11 fi w t hnt T have ever seen, and I had then seen the vest- 
"entf o a 1 be ^ tens at Constantinople, and those of those 
priests in he Church of the Holy Sepulcher seemed to me to , be 
Sled down with gold and jewels that were just as tally the rea 
wei meu tlie c S nltans It seemed to me that the clothes of 

Klto^S^52ta« cost $1,000,000. Hfose Moham- 
medans were half such rascals as those priests are, the Mohamme- 
£ would take all of those line clothes away from the priests an 
the rohberv would be no worse than the robbery of the people by 
the pStsVall ^e religions frauds that the priests practice upon 

1116 Take'it all around Jerusalem is the most demoralizing place 
ip the world-Monte Carlo, or a Lexington race track is not a 
natch oH-and that Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the head 
ot the town and that old Patnarch of Jerusalem-Greek Catholic 
-ifthe king bee of the whole thing. Let any man show to me that 
it was a 1-ang of old Jernsalem Tom eats like that that Jesus lacked 
ontof the temple, and I say to him as Agnppa said to Paul, Al- 
most thon persnadest me to be a Christian.' 

" Ind vet I beheve that I, or any other priest or preacher, at 
one time in my life, certainly, would have taken the job of the 
Patriarch of Jerusalem, or the Pope of Borne. 

T have already told yon, at different times a good deal about 
Calvar and th tomb in the garden that is thought by Protestants 
£ be the place where Jesus was buried, but these two places are 



DOGr FEXKEL IX THE ORIENT 



161 



perhaps the most important in my Oriental tour, my chief distinc- 
tion being, as a writer about religions matters, and, I believe, my 
readers generally wanting to know what effect my tour had upon 
my religious opinions more than they want to know anything else 
about it. 



CHAPTER V. 



Calvary is a hill or mount about a half mile I would guess, 
from the nearest point to the wall of Jerusalem, and from mem- 
ory. I would guess not more than fifty feet higher than the wall. 
It is a good place from which to get a view of Jerusalem, and, of 
course, a place that can be seen from many parts of Jerusalem and 
therefore, if a man was to be crucified it is a fine place for that 
purpose and I think it was the policy of those days to have criminal 
executions where they could be seen by the public, and I do not 
remember to have seen any other place around Jerusalem that was 
nearly so well adapted to that purpose. 

The top of the Mount of Olives can be seen from Jerusalem 
*- very much easier than the top of Calvary can. but the top of the 
Mount of Olives is so far from Jerusalem, about two miles in a 
straight line, that the details of a crucifixion on it. could not be 
seen from any point in Jerusalem. 

There is no timber growing on the Mount Calvary, and I sup- 
pose there was none growing there even in the days of, Jesus, as- 
suming that there was such a man there nearly 2,000 years ago. 
Calvary is a smooth hill, covered with grass, and with no rocks on 
it. It is not steep enough to be hard to walk up. The party of six 
or eight that came out in carriages with me — the distance around 
through the gate that we went through being about two miles — re- 
. mained in the garden at the foot of the mount until I had been up 
on the mount, alone for a half hour, and then they came up. I 
felt lonely and somewhat homesick, and it may have been that I 
rather encouraged the tears to come into my eyes so that I could 
tell about it in this book, and I thought about those vile, lying ras- 
cally priests that I had seen in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher 
and I believed that those scoundrels- would, if the Mohammedans 
would allow them, crucify any man. to-day. who would go there 
and say to them truthfully just the same things that Jesus said 
to the priests there, in his day, and I got to trying to determine 
whether or not Jesus had done that, and the wish .may have been 
father to the thought that he had done it. and I am past my three- 
score and I have always been a little weak in my emotional nature?, 
any way, and I felt that the tears were dimming my eyes, and 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 163 

I checked myself, because I did not want the Cookies to find me 
in anything that looked like tears, and I did not want to dim my 
glasses with tears and I felt that I was acting the hypocrite in try- 
ing to give way to an improbable piece of sentimentality. But 
at this day that I am writing this as it has appeared to me since I 
saw Jerusalem, the idea that Jesus Christ was, very probably, 
altogether a mvth, so far as his existence in Palestine is concerned, 
is not so strong in my mind, if any difference, as it formerly was. 

All the miraculous and supernatural part of the life of Jesus 
Christ as given in the N. T. is but a revamp of those same old 
stories that had been in all countries and in all ages, long before 
Jesus was born, and that are, up to date, bobbing up serenely m 
various parts of the world. 

George 0. Barnes, of Kentucky, was, in many very striking 
respects very much like Jesus Christ, one of the resemblances being 
that Jesus and Barnes managed to live for a good many years, 
without working any, and yet Barnes was a good man and I loved 
him, and still love him, though he is now engaged licking the boots 
of old Dowie, an old rascal, for whom hanging is not a bit too good. 

While I was in the Orient a Christian, here m America, 
named Eugene B. Willard, advocated the burning at the stake 
of infidels, and I have right in my own State of Kentucky seen the 
time when with such a man as Willard to lead them, the preachers 
and politicians of Lexington, and distillers of Paris, Ivy., might 
have combined to burn me at the stake, just as Christians did burn 
a man at the stake, about three years ago, in Maysville, Ky. It is 
not at all impossible then that the priests of the days of Jesus 
may have taken great pleasure in crucifying him, for saying about 
them the things reported in the N. T. It was not the policy of the 
Roman government to interfere with the religion of its provinces 
and vet I do not think that, ordinarily, that government would 
have allowed one religious faction to persecute another to death, 
vet in the case of Jesus there was no little to warrant the idea that 
his' views of religion were calculated to produce rebellion against 
the Roman government, and while Pilate, representing the Roman 
government evidently hesitated, from the account m the N. 1. 
about the propriety of giving Jesus irfto the hands of the Jews, 
it is not at all impossible that they would crucify him, or encourage 
the Romans to crucify him. 

I think therefore, that there probably was a young man m 
Jerusalem who had some of the peculiarities that we may rationally 
recoo-nize belonged to Jesus, and that, like other men, he had good 
qualities and bad ones, some of them being very striking, and that 
he had enthusiastic admirers and that after his career resulted 



164 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OKIEXT 



in his being crucified by the Jews his admirers added to the story 
of his real life, all miracles and supernaturalism that we have in 
the X. T. woven around the story of his life, as had been done with 
other men. 

Two other possibilities are that Jesus may have been simply 
an impostor, or that he may have been demented ; but. altogether, 
I incline to the impression that there was a man more or less 
like the character of Jesus in the X. T. and that he was crucified 
and killed, or possibly did not die from having been crucified, and 
that the story of his having arisen from the dead may have come 
from honest error or imposture. Certain it is, to all competent 
thinkers that he never rose from the dead. 

If Mount Calvary and the tomb and garden at the foot of it are 
regarded as one place, that place and the Mount of Olives are the 
most interesting two places in, or very near, Jerusalem, and I hope, 
therefore, that you will not be impatient if I use considerable of 
your time in describing that garden and that tomb. 

The garden occupies about an acre and is nearly level, but is a 
little lower at the place that you come into it than at the back of it. 
You have to come into the garden to get to the tomb. The gate 
into the garden is at the left hand corner as you come to the 
garden. Immediately to the right of the gate after you have come 
in, is the house of the gardener. The X. T. says that Mary Mag- 
dalene thought the risen Jesus was the "gardener" when she first 
saw him. That gardeners house is about, say, thirty feet by twenty 
and is one story high. It is built of stone, in the same permanent 
way that all the old houses about Jerusalem are, and looks like it 
might have been standing there ever since the days of Jesus with 
probably some repairs on it and some little modern improvement 
about the porch. I saw nothing at all about that garden, or tomb, 
or about Mount Calvary, or about the people there that looked at 
all like fraud. The Catholics have nothing at all to do with it, so 
far as any reverence for any of the three places goes. I picked 
up a number of pebbles from the garden a few feet in front of the 
door of the sepulcher, and gave my Catholic friend Sweeney one, 
when I met him a day or so after, telling him that I had brought 
it from the tomb of Jesus. He took the pebble as if he was quite 
glad to get it. It is almost impossible to find a pebble or a stone of 
any kind near the tomb of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepul- 
cher, and Sweeney evidently supposed I had found that pebble 
near the sepulcher in the church. He kept the pebble for a while 
and then came to me and asked me from which of the two se- 
pulchers I had gotten it, and when I told him it was from the one 
out at Calvary he handed the pebble back to me and said he did not 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE OEIEXT 



165 



want it, and in a manner that showed that he regarded the se- 
pulcher at Calvary a fraud. 

Any intelligent man who is familiar with the history and con- 
ditions of Jerusalem would know that it was not possible for 
Joseph of Arimathea to have had a "new tomb" where that one in 
the Church of the Holy Sepulcher now is, in the days of Jesus 
Christ. 

That garden is cultivated in fairly good style in flowers and 
vegitables and a woman who lives at that house sells flower seeds 
that she says grow in that garden. It seems to me probable that 
she was selling more flower seeds there than seemed to have been 
produced in that garden, and I think she was. 

There was a man there who had special charge of the sepulcher 
of Jesus, He was the meanest man I saw in my whole tour, except 
that Eichmond, Virginia, Cookie we took along with us. He spoke 
good English and was there from England or some of its posses- 
sions, was a Protestant and had been there for seventeen years, 
holding down that sepulcher job. The associations of the place did 
not seem to have made him very amiable. When somebody asked 
who would conduct us to the sepulcher the woman said she would 
and said that the man there was no good, or words to that effect. I 
thought it was the woman's rivalry against the man, but she sized 
him up about right. The woman was so occupied with selling her 
flower seeds that the man conducted the party. The sepulcher is 
about the middle of the wall on the left side as you go in. The 
front of the tomb forms a part of the wall. The front of the tomb 
is about -twenty-five feet long and ten feet high, and is cut straight 
and perpendicular in the solid rock. Eunning all along the length 
of the' front of the tomb and up against the wall is a place also cut 
. in the solid stone that is about six inches higher than the level 
stone surface in front of the tomb and in that elevated place there 
is cut the groove a foot wide in which rolled the round stone that I 
have described to vou, as having been used to fasten the door that 
goes into the sepulcher. The man in charge there said that round 
stone had been taken from there to Eome. I never saw or heard of 
it in Eome, and do not see why the Eoman Catholics would want 
that stone unless it was to destroy it, as all Catholics at Jerusalem 
say that sepulcher is not the one in which Jesus was put, At some 
time in the history of that sepulcher some one has made, across 
that groove, out of" cement that is almost as hard as the stone, four 
or five little division walls each about four inches thick so as to 
divide that groove up into troughs in which to feed donkeys,^ so 
the man said, and that seemed a probable explanation. Every thing 
about that sepulcher appeared very ancient. Since that tomb had 



166 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



been made pebbles and soil had accumulated against the front of 
that sepulcher about four feet deep and then this, some time appar- 
ently in the last one hundred years, or so. had all been dug away 
down to the solid stone that is leveled off in front of the sepulcher 
the whole length of the sepulcher and for about ten feet wide and 
carried away so as to restore the opening into the tomb. There 
is enough of pebbles and solid debris in front of that sepulcher 
that has evidently gathered there since the sepulcher was made, 
to load several big American railroad gravel cars. 

The door that goes into the sepulcher is about six feet tall. 
It was made before "the Catholics began to make doors into their 
holy places that forced vou to bow. I lack a half inch of being six 
feet high and I do not remember that I had to bow, except possibly 
to save" my typical Southern broad-brimmed soft-hat that I wore 
when ashore/ That door was about two and one-half feet wide and 
was cut into the solid stone about two and one-half feet when on 
the right side it opened into a chamber about ten feet square and 
about seven feet high. A passage the width of the door continued 
to the opposite wall. To the right of this passage there were three 
graves, or places in which to put dead people, the end of which 
came to the passage. These graves were each about two and one-half 
feet broad and two feet deep, and were cut square down to their 
bottoms. Between the graves there were, originally, two spaces or 
partitions, each space being about five inches thick. All of this 
was cut solid and neatly and accurately. 

An interesting fact is that the space between the first ^ two 
graves, as vou enter, has been broken out so completely that the 
first two graves are thrown together so that one might suppose 'the 
space occupied by them and the small remains of the partition be- 
tween them to be a part of the room and not to have been intended 
for burial places. All of that stone is perfectly solid and without 
any kind of fissure in it. The guard said that the grave farthest 
from the door and which is still in perfect preservation was the one 
in which Jesus was laid. Of course he could not know. It is prac- 
tically impossible that the partition between those first two graves 
ever could have been broken out by accident. It required a heavy 
hammer and considerable pains to do it. No part of that partition 
remains in the tomb except the small part that never was broken 
loose and that sticks in the corners and along the floor of the two 
graves. The appearance of what remains of that partition would 
indicate that it had been broken out a long time ago. It occurred 
to me at the time that some one, in a mistaken religious spirit, had 
broken out that partition in order to have it appear that no one but 
Jesus had ever been buried in that tomb, and though that theory did 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIEXT 



167 



not seem very plausible, it was the one that I entertained until I 
came to the point where I am now writing, and now my impression 
is that the partition was broken out to make the place a good little 
stable for donkeys, the grave of Jesus being used as a trough or 
manger in which to put their food. I would have asked that guard 
about that partition being broken out but an incident happened 
that showed me that he was not the kind of a man with whom I 
wanted to have any more words than were necessary. 

Of course I knew that it would have been wrong to do any- 
thing to disfigure any part of that sepulcher in order to get from it 
any small piece of stone as a souvenir. There was not a loose piece 
of "anything in it, and nobody could have gotten anything out of it 
except by the use of a hammer. I happened to notice that, back of 
the grave of Jesus there had oozed out of the wall a little deposit 
of some kind that had hardened on the side of the wall in two little 
lumps about the size of two peas, and which were about as hard 
as the plaster on the walls of one of our American houses. I pulled 
them off, intending to bring them to some Christian friend in 
America if they did not crumble. That fellow who was guarding 
that tomb, and who seemed to-be about forty-five years old, saw 
me break off the little pieces and he became so mad that he was 
insulting and threatened to have me arrested. I knew a man who 
was mean enough to talk as he was talking to me, an old man, who 
certainly appeared to venerate the grave of Jesus Christ and to 
crave just any little memento from it, was mean enough to lie to 
have me arrested, and to have been detained there, after the depart- 
ure of the Cookies, would have been a very serious thing to me ; so I 
demurely took back the two little lumps of sediment and laid them 
on the edge of the tomb of Jesus— real or so-called. 

I have heard preachers descant a great deal upon the loveliness 
of "living near to the cross," but that fellow, for seventeen years, 
according to his statement has been living nearer to the cross than 
any man in the whole world, and it certainly has made him a cross 

man. . _ , 

That woman at the gardener's house is a good woman about 
fifty years old, and, as she says, has lived there all her life, and 
probably several generations of her ancestry before her, and, as 
she said, it is reasonably to suppose she knows more about the place 
than that man, and as "the most interesting traditions of the place 
are the X. T. stories of the women who were there as the friends of 
Jesus, I think those who have control of the sepulcher and garden 
ought to dismiss that man, and put the woman in charge. 

It is only a suggestion of mine that that woman sells more 
garden seed, "reported to have grown in that garden, than the 



168 



DOG- FEXXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



garden, though still a good one. produces, but, if she does, it is no 
worse than the thousands of men in Jerusalem who make their 
livings by selling Jerusalem souvenirs that they all say they know 
are genuine because, they say. they have made them themselves, 
when it seems to be generally known that nearly all of those things 
are made in Germany and that the very few that are made in Jeru- 
salem are all made by women. 

One theory about the resurrection of Jesus is that he never 
died on the cross and that having been put in the tomb he revived. 
This is entirely possible, especially as Pilate, representing the Eo- 
mans. was not in favor of crucifying Jesus and the tomb in which 
he was placed in a grave with no covering to it. had an abundance 
of fresh air, especially if Jesus was the first one that had ever been 
put in that tomb, as the X. T. says. 

Mount Calvary from which Jesus is said to ha\~ ascended to 
heaven is a place of great interest. Xo Catholic believes that Jesus 
was crucified on the mountain called Calvary, but both Protestants 
and Catholics agree in believing that Jesus ascended to heaven 
from the Mount of Olives, and the Catholics go still further with 
the story than the Protestants do. What the X. T. says about 
things in the history of Jesus seems to cut no figure at all as to 
what the people there think about him, if we except the few Pro- 
testants there, whose opinions have no general influence. If the N. 
T. agrees with what those people believe it is regarded as being 
creditable to the X. T., but if it does not agree with them it is "so 
much the worse for the Bible," as Wendell Phillips said. 

A straight line, from the middle of Jerusalem to the highest 
point on Mount Olivet, would be about two and one-half miles, 
but following the windings of the nice carriage road that goes up it, 
it was four miles from our hotel. Mount Oliver is one of the high- 
est points near around Jerusalem. The idea that by getting on the 
top of a mountain you get nearer to heaven pervades our whole 
Bible, and was entertained by the Greeks and Eomans. many years 
before the beginning of the Christian religion. The Monnt of 
Olives has scarely any trees on it except such as have been planted 
there. It was. when we saw it. covered with short green grass. The 
mountain has hardly any rocks on the top of it but is quite smooth. 
From the top of that mountain the Dead Sea. about thirty miles 
off, can be plainly seen. There is a modern and nice and perma- 
nent house on top of the mountain. There is no use for this hou«e 
except to get money out of people who visit there. There seems 
to be no necessity for anybody to take care of that mountain. Tt 
seems liable to remain there for a good while, if not longer, unless 
it gets to "skipping and dancing for joy/ 5 as the Bible says mourn 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



169 



tains sometimes clo, or unless, sometime, Mohammed comes to 
earth again and not being able to go to that mountain the mountain 
may go to him, or unless, some night, an angel may move that 
mountain to Rome, as angels seem liable, at any time, these days, 
to take things of that kind from Jerusalem to Rome. In any of 
these events that house on the top of Olivet and the people in it, 
would not probably hold the mountain down. There are two things 
up on that mountain to be seen. One is an apiary there, managed 
by the man who has the house. It is said to be very interesting. 
I did not see it, because while I was up there, we saw the only rain 
coming that the Cookies saw in the whole tour, and we hurried to 
our carriage and went back to town. But I did not go until T had 
thoroughly seen and examined what is perhaps the most flagrant of 
all the thousand and one frauds of the Christian religion. This is 
the stone in which Jesus made the track of his bare foot when he 
ascended to heaven. I think it is of sufficient interest to warrant a 
minute description of it 

My friend, C. F. Sweeney, of 57 Havre street, Boston Mass., 
was the only person who was with me, except the guard when I 
looked at that track in the rock made by Jesus when he ascended 
to heaven. Sweeney is a Catholic, and a Boston lawyer. "As sharp 
as a Boston lawyer," and "As sharp as a tack" are two proverbs 
with which I have been familiar, the first for over fifty years and 
the latter for thirty years. Sweeney regarded that track in that 
rock just as reverently as he regarded the tomb of Jesus in the 
Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Sweeney had in his pocket two 
bundles wrapped in newspapers of English print, These bundles 
were each about five inches long and two inches in diameter, and I 
supposed had in them souvenirs for his friends at home. He took 
those two bundles out of his coat pocket and laid them in the heel 
part of the track, and stood for not more than ten second? and 
looked at them reverently and religiously, as if he felt that the ar- 
ticles would gain some religious significance or miraculous power 
by their being in there. I would not say that he wanted to be well 
heeled for healing, by miracle, because I do not know 01 even sus- 
pect that that was his purpose, and it would not be a good piece 
of wit anyhow, and I simply say it in order to forestall some fool 
who otherwise, might say it. 

I could start out to-day and on the banks of Elkhorn creek 
near which I live, and find a half dozen rocks that had indenta- 
tions in them that were fully as much like the track of a man as 
was that track on Mount Olivet. The track was in a piece of 
yellow stone, somewhat like marble and evidently was not of any 
variety of stone in that mountain. That piece of ?tone was about 



170 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIENT 



two feet long and ten inches wide. I could not see how thick but 
I would have guessed, from circumstances, that it was not more 
than four inches thick. There was a curbing of the same kind of 
stone, made of slabs two inches thick that were set in the ground 
on their edges, evidently to hold the flat slab ^ontainihg the tr?ck 
in its place" It was perfectly evident that that slab did not nat- 
urally belong there, as there was no other rock near it. and it is 
hardly possible that that slab could have been there longer than 
fifty years and probably not more than twenty-five. 

The part of the "track" representing the heel had borne resem- 
blance to the track of a man's heel, but the entire "track" 7 was fully 
three inches longer than my foot, and I wear a number seven and 
one-half shoe. An Arab says the highest claim to aristocracy of 
birth is to have a foot under' the arch of which water ?an run with- 
out wetting the foot. That track was not a case in which the "hol- 
low of her foot made a hole in the ground."* but it did not come 
up to the Arab standard of a high-bred foot. The heel of the track 
is' nearly twice as wide as any other part of the track. The heel 
and the' arch of the foot show it to have been the left foot but the 
bis- toe is on the opposite side from the arch of the foot. That 
there should be only one track and that the track of the left foot 
is all right. When you go to mount a horse you start on your Left 
foot and I suppose that a party in making a spring to start to 
heaven would start from the left foot. The slab of stone in winch 
the track is lies slanting on the hill so that the toe of the foot is 
two inches higher than the heel of the foot, and a thing that will 
make some skeptical gainsaver doubt the genuineness of that track 
Is that the heel of the track which is down hill is deeper than the 
toe which is up hill. and. of course. Jesus started off of his toe and 
the toe part of the track ought to be deeper than the heel part of 
the track because Jesus must have put most of his weight on his 
toe. It is from this fact that my friend Sweeney put his two 
bundles in the heel of the track which was down hill. The very 
highest point on Mount Olivet is about fifty yards from where that 
track is and is ten feet higher than the place where the track is, and 
the walking is unusually "good, so that it seems strange that Jesus, 
having come four miles to get up on Olivet, did not go fifty yards 
further and go to the very top. but he may have foreseen that that 
house would be built there to guard that track and so he made the 
track nearer to where the house was going to be so that the man 
could watch it better. 

If Moses got two big tables of stone on top of a mountain 
and carried them down the mountain. Jesus may have gotten that 
one table of stone at the bottom of the mountain and have carried 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIEXT 



171 



it up the mountain just to start to heaven from, and it may have 
been a parable or allegory intended to teach that the law of Moses 
must descend while the law of Jesus must ascend. It is also possi- 
ble that there is a companion piece to that track ; that is the track 
of the right foot which an angel may have taken to Borne, some 
night, and that may yet be found among the plunder that the 
angels have carried ' from Jerusalem to Rome, in the night, and 
which track has never yet been labled and put on exhibition in 
Rome. I hope the Pope will have this matter looked into and trot 
out that right foot track and put it where it can be seen by Cookies 
and other pilgrims for the ordinary monetary consideration; the 
Cooks anteing the consideration for all of their parties. 

It would certainly be easier for an angel to carry a slab two 
feet by ten inches from the top of the Mount of Olives to Rome, 
where' the angel would have a good place to start from, than it 
would he to carry twenty-five white marble steps each twenty feet 
long from Jerusalem to Rome— not on railroad freight cars but 
simply flying with those steps, through the air. 

"Via Dolorosa" is one of the widest streets in Jerusalem. I 
would guess about thirteen feet wide. This street gets its name 
from the fact that it was along that street that Jesus carried his 
cross on the way to Calvary, according to some accounts, and it 
is on this street that all Protestants believe Jesus carried his cross 
and not the place in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as the 
Catholics believe. There are two entirely separate ways along 
which Jesus is said there in Jerusalem to have carried his cross, on 
his way to be crucified ; one goes to the Mount Calvary that is about 
twenty-five feet high in Jerusalem, and the other goes to the Mount 
Calvary about one hundred and fifty feet high outside of the walls 
of Jerusalem. Each of these ways have, marked among them, four- 
teen places where Jesus fell under the cross, though only one such 
place is mentioned in the Xew Testament. In each case the places 
where Jesus fell are numbered up on the side of the wail about 
twelve feet high. The road that the Protestants believe to be the 
genuine one has, marked upon the wall, the place where Simon the 
Cyrenean took the cross and carried it on to Calvary. I do not 
remember to have seen, or to have heard of, any place on the 
road that the Catholics say is the true one, where Simon took up 
the cross. 

We saw the house of Dives and the place where Lazarus sat. 
There are two men in the X. T. named Lazarus. One was a poor 
man, and one was a rich man and Jesus spent much of his time 
with the rich one, and then said a rich man could not go to heaven 
and Dives went to hell because he was a rich man. 



172 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIEXT 



The story about the rich man and Lazarus that is given in the 
X. T. is commonly understood to be a kind of parable or imagina- 
tive story, by our American preachers, but in Jerusalem that story 
is believed to be as literally true as any account in the Bible, and 
the stone upon which Lazarus sat, and the house in which Dives 
lived are shown there now just as any of the other historical places 
there are shown. - 

If the stone upon which Lazarus is said to have sat was always 
the shape it now is .nobody ever could have sat upon it. The stone 
sits in a corner in a wall. It is about two and one-half feet high. 
Its end at the bottom is triangular, two sides of the end coming out 
about eigth inches each on the two sides that form the angle in the 
wall and then the stone slopes regularly to a point at the top, and 
as it is now nobody could sit on it, even a little bit, unless he had 
molasses or some other sticky stuff on the seat of his pants. 

Seems to me, sometimes, that I am inspired, and one of those 
impressions has just now struck me and I believe I see perfectly 
clearly how that place used to be the seat upon which Lazarus sat 
and is now sharp on top, and it just occurred to me how it got 
to be so and no guide ever suggested it, but I believe this explana- 
tion that I am now going to give will get to Jerusalem, through 
Ephraim Aboosh, the guide who is a subscriber for this book, and 
that this explanation will be given by him, to future visitors m 
Jerusalem and will thus become the explanation of the fact that a 
stone upon which everybody in Jerusalem believes that Lazarus sat 
is certainly now a stone upon which nobody could sit, and it seems 
to have been shaped so as to keep anybody from sitting on it. 

The following is my explanation of the story about that stone. 
That stone is about twenty yards from a corner on a street, and 
if you walk along the wall against which that stone is, on down the 
hill, until you come to the next street and then turn to the right 
down that street, still following along that same wall, in about fifty 
yards you come to the house of Dives, still standing there, and the 
best of all the ancient private- residences in Jerusalem. The house 
of Dives is built on each side of that street and arches over the 
street, just like the Grand Hotel where some of the Cookies stayed. 
The hotel having been built in late years now stands on both sides 
of the street and goes over the street on an arch. 

Old Dives owned all that property clear around that corner 
and up the street and beyond the rock upon which Lazarus sat. 
That rock was originally a post just as high as it is now but was 
square and eight or ten inches on a side. There is no place along 
there now where any man can sit and the men and women there 
now sit right down on the street and beg for bucksheesh. ^ hen 



DOG" FENNEL 'IK" THE OEIENT 



173 



that square stone post stood up in that corner it was a good seat 
for beggars to sit on. The 'word Lazarus in that story is printed as 
the proper name of a particular man, but the word Lazarus simply 
means a poor man. Even the preachers can tell you that. Well, 
there was always some poor beggar sitting on that stone, and 
whenever old Dives would go up town to see if any Cookies had 
come in, on the last train, so that he might sell them a lot of Jeru- 
salem souvenirs some fellow sitting on that square-topped post that 
had the two walls to make a good back to the seat, would bone old 
Dives for some bucksheesh, and the old fellow got tired of it and 
the stone belonged to old Dives and he just sent around there and 
had that stone trimmed down to a sharp point so that nobody could 
sit on it, and it's that way to this day, and anybody of any sense can 
see that I have completely reconciled a statement in the N". T. 
with a historical fact that seems to conflict with it, and it 
shows you must not go agin the scriptures until you get all the. 
facts before you. Ten years ago the richest man in Lexington 
drove around the streets with sharp nails sticking up out of the seat 
on the back of his buggy, to keep the boys from riding on it. Ten 
thousand people will read what I am now saying and will remember 
who that man was. He was a devout Presbyterian. That man is 
dead now and he and Dives are both in hell, one sitting on a sharp 
pointed rock and one riding all the time on a buggy seat with sharp 
nails sticking up out of it, Both of those rich men are in hell, and 
ought to be and I am glad of it. I think the American Missionary 
Society in Jerusalem ought to buy and distribute not less than 
100,000 copies of this book, as the true explanation of the facts 
about that rock upon which Lazarus sat and which rock, as it is 
now, without this explanation, is making infidels of half the Chris- 
tians who go to Jerusalem, because they cannot believe that any 
man ever sat upon that rock. 

The house of Dives is there now and is in good order and it 
spans across that street just like the Bridge of Sighs spans across 
the canal in Venice. Dives' house is built of white marble, or 
white stone, and it really looks like it might have stood there ever 
since the days of Jesus. And now I am going to give you another 
theological pointer. Dives is not the name of any one man but it is a 
name for any rich man, and Jesus alluded to the rich man who 
lived in that particular house, and without giving any name thous- 
ands of people knew what man he was talking about just as thous- 
ands of people in Lexington will know about the rich man there 
who had nails in his buggy, though I give no name. 

We went to the Mosque of Omar. It is a fine building, very 
large, and has a great display of mosaics and gilding, and texts 



m POG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

from the Koran and columns and lamps It stands upon the site 
of Solomons temple. It is said that ordinarily Christians are not 
a low 1 o^o in, hut the Cooks fixed it some way so that we could 
cet in I suppose the Cooks told the Mohammedans that there was 
Tot mougl religion m. the party to hurt and the guards having 
boked t the gang concluded the Cooks were right about it. I 
thought it all a bluff about our getting in and it may be true that it 
wTs but it was the onlv place that anybody stopped our party. We 
In ha papers that the Cooks had given us that seemed to have 
enough of red tape about them to satisfy any ordinary man and 
our papers had taken us into other very exclusive places mthon 
anv trouble There were so many of us and there were plenty of 
S liona es and big bankers in the party and our women had c i - 
Tonds bv ihe peck like peanuts, and we had always counted that 
Tr "ang could'paralvze anything we went up agm and <nn -custom 
hacl been to walk right on iuto anything we saw and leave Cooks 
mn to d anv quarreling, or put up any extra backsheesh Jhat 
mig ht he necessary, as the Cooks were under con ra . to do for u 
This time we started on in to see the sights as usual ana a Dig 
Ifonammedln guard called a halt on us that had a sound ahou it 

paper in town if he wanted to find a house of that land 

11 So we had to stand right there like a gang « 

o-ukles could go off with one or two soldiers that the big Turk sent 



DOG FEW EL IX THE ORIEXT 



175 



we came to that town and started to go into a house the worshipers 
of which believed in the only true Allah and Mohammed as his 
only prophet, if we did not get some better manners on us he would 
put the whole gang where we would have the benefit of a night 
school. And finally he told them to bring out some slippers and 
they brought out three or four wheel-barrow loads of them about the 
size of snow shoes and all of us. with a look of great reverence for 
the Mohammedan religion, got out of our profane Christian shoes — 
they ranked me and the preachers as all links of the same dog 
sausage — and into those big yellow slippers and then started into 
the show, and to apologize for our exceeding flyness, we all pulled 
off our hats but were told to put them on again. It seeems that 
we ought to have known that etiquette in a mosque required us to 
pull off our shoes and keep on our hats, but we had become accus- 
tomed to the opposite of that in the Christian churches and had 
to break ourself of a long practiced bad habit. 

Paul requires that the ladies shall keep their bonnets on in 
church and so that is the custom in our Christian churches to this 
day, and a woman who would come into church bareheaded would 
be regarded as ill-mannered, and the Mohammedan has that same 
idea about a man coming into a mosque bareheaded. So that in 
religion, as in other things, fashion goes a long way. 

There is a rock there fifty feet across on which Solomon sacri- 
ficed to the Lord. There is also a rock there, forty or fifty feet 
across that is round like a disk but is somewhat higher in the mid- 
dle. It is the rock from which Mohammed ascended to heaven and 
has Mohammed's foot-print in it made at the time Mohammed 
ascended. I cannot exactly remember the appearance of Moham- 
med's footprint, except that I think I recall that it was hardly so 
much like a foot-print as the one that Jesus left in the rock where 
he ascended to heaven. I suppose the rock from which Mohammed 
ascended is ten feet thick in its thickest part and an average of five 
feet thick and I would guess that it would weigh fifty tons. When 
Mohammed ascended to heaven from that rock the rock attempted 
to go to heaven with him and would have succeeded, probably, had 
not the angel Gabriel caught the rock and held it- back and when 
Gabriel pulled it down it made the prints of the angel's fingers in 
it and those finger prints are there to this day, and like another 
doubting Thomas, in order to assure myself that there could be no 
mistake about the angel having made those finger prints there, I 
put my own fingers into the prints that the angel made. My hand 
is not one of these dainty hands that some of the society ladies 
wear, and the finger prints of Gabriel were so much larger than 
•my fingers that I estimated that Gabriel must have been thirty or 



176 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

forty feet high as indeed, he must have been to hold down as big a 
mck as that was iust hell-bent on going to heaven 

I had been under the impression that Mohammed started from 
\rahia when he went to heaven, and that might have been true, 
and an an el may have brought this rock afterward to Jerusalem 
a« the ano-el took those big marble steps from Jerusalem to Borne 
and if I were an angel and had to fly and carry those steps or carry 
Zt rock Twould lust pitch up heads or tails to decide between 
t em That Mohammed ascended to heaven from that rock where 
If now sevid nt from the following fact: That big rock » sus- 
pended in the an-, except that it touches a httle bit around the 
ea bS it touches so little that anybody can easily see, to tins 
day as we all saw, that it is held there by a miracle. 

mmmmm 
msMmm 

some people and killed them. 

Tint that that rock did. at one time, start to tall Gabriel pos 

solid rock, and 1 am im lei m ^ dieates that Mohammed was a 
what it professes to be '^^^Xrerter of the man, according 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



177 



question as to when the world is coming to an end, and is of special 
value to theologians who are making a specialty of the study of the 
Millennium and especially to Millerites. 

There are, I suppose, 100,000 blocks of marble, black and 
white, in checker board style in that pavement. They are each 
about ten inches square. 

When Mohammed was there he took a hammer and some nails 
and drove the nails into one of those blocks of marble in that 
pavement and he said that when those nails had disappeared the 
world would come to an end, and a Mohammedan guard of two or 
three men, sits there all the time, day and night, I suppose, for 
fear some bad fellow will come there with one of these patent 
Yankee nail pullers, some time, and pull those nails out and bring 
the world to a close before the people there are ready for it, for 
those Mohammedans, like Kentucky Christians, don't seem to want 
to go to heaven until they have to. 

How many nails have disappeared, according to the regular 
arrangement that Mohammed contemplated, I could not gather, 
because I was not up on Arabic, but there are there now three and 
one half nails, the half of one there indicating that these nails dis- 
appear by degrees, but how long they estimate, from those three and 
one-half nails that the world will still last I do not know, but if I 
had known enough Arab talk to find out how many nails Moham- 
med drove into that rock, I could have told, almost to a year when 
the end of the world would come, for I already know how long it 
was since Mohammed was on earth. 

Nobody can see any reason why, of all those blocks of marble, 
Mohammed should have picked out that particular one to drive 
the nails in, and, therefore, I conclude as Tertullian did, and as 
many of the clergy do, in theology, to this day, that the very fact 
that there is no reason in it is high evidence that that story about 
the nails in that rock is true. 

I did not examine the nails closely, but I looked at them as I 
walked slowly by and my impression is that they are about eight- 
penny fence nails. I did not inspect, very closely, the manner in 
which the nails were driven into that rock, but if I did not it was 
my own fault; those Arabs were there for the purpose of showing 
them. But if I had examined them and had thought I discovered 
anything about the job that I thought bogus I would have had sense 
enough to have kept my head shut, for that big Turk that had 
charge of the guard there had taught me a lesson about being too 
fly about things connected with the Mohammedan religion ; and I 
do not blame him. The Mohammedans have entire and absolute 
control of all that country and they do not believe in the Christian 



178 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OBIEXT 



relio-ion a little bit. and vet they stand there patiently and respect- 
fully and guard the tomb of Jesus and the one of the two places 
where he was buried that all the fighting is done at. and 
all of this is done at the expense of the Mohamme- 
dans—paid for by the government— and they demand that the 
Christians shall show the Mohammedans just as much respect as 
the Mohammedans show the Christians, and I say. bully for the 
Mohammedans, for doing so. And vet I heard one or more Catho- 
lics and I think Sweeny was one of them, expressing contempt 
for the Mohammedan show, and wanting to make all the Cookies 
o-et out of it. when those Catholics would kiss the foot-print ot 
Jesus in that little rock, that you could carry under your arm. 
and ridicule the story of the foot-print of Mohammed m that big 
rock that it would take a lot of big freight cars to handle : so big 
that even the Moltke could not handle it without first breaking it 

m ^That foot-print of Mohammed in that rock. has. dead certain, 
been there ever since the Mosqne of Omar was built which was away 
back during the career of Mohammed or of his immediate followers. 
That mosque had to be built over that rock, for it could not have 
been put in the mosque since the mosque was built, and the fellows 
who built the pyramids in Egypt were not able to handle such a 
rock as that in the Mosque of Omar, and the who le thing indicates 
that at some time, less than fifty years ago. the Christians had put 
that rock with the track of Jesus in it up on Olivet having 
caught the idea from Mohammed's foot-print in the lug rock m the 
Mosque of Omar; and when the Mohammedan guides would stand 
bv respectfully, and see the Christians kiss that foot-print of Jesus 
on Olivet, or 'lick it if they wanted to. when some ot those oldest 
cniides could recollect when the Christians put that rock on Olivet 
and the Mohammedans were still protecting the C hristians m then 
right to reverence that rock, and then a gang of those very same 
Catholic Irish Yankees would go with those same Mohammedan 
o-nides and ridicule the track of Mohammed in the Mohammedan 
' rock, I would have laughed if the Mohammedans had arrested the 
whole o-ancr of us Cookies and put us all in jail, tor it would have 
taught those fellows a good lesson and I would not have Rinded it 
for the Christians have put me in jail until I am used to it and 
to have been put in jail by the Mohammedans would have, at least, 
been some variety. 

The guards who had charge of that block of marble with the 
nails in it! said if anybody would put some money on that block- 
ed let it stay there/of course-he would go to heaven. * looked 
like the best chance to get to heaven, on a cheap plan, that 1 had 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



179 



seen but I was short on money and did not put up — or, rather, put 
down — any. 

The Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem is the most holy place in 
the world, to Mohammedans, except Mecca. 

We saw the place where Abraham, David, Elijah and Solomon 
used to pray. I could not exactly understand how Abraham got 
to praying there. There was a fountain there that came from Solo- 
mon's pools. We saw the place where Zecheriah was slain between 
the temple and the altar. 

Out in the grounds near the mosque was a well into the stones 
of which there were grooves worn two inches deep by ropes used for 
centuries in drawing water. They showed us also Christ's cradle. 
I cannot recall how it looked. I wish I could. I cannot even 
remember whether it was wood or stone, or a manger or horse 
trough. 

About three acres of the ground on one side of the Mosque of 
Omar is covered with dressed stones, about two feet square. The 
whole space under these is occupied by the stable of Solomon. The 
Bible says he had 60,000 horses. Seems like a good many horses 
for one man, but then he had 1,000 wives and a good deal of com- 
pany and it took a good many. The stable is all in one room, the 
bottom of which is probably thirty feet under the ground and the 
roof is held up by probably one hundred columns that are about 
twenty-five feet high. This stable is about square and I suppose 
has about three acres in it. I do not remember whether the col- 
umns were made by just hewing out the solid rock, or are built up 
with masonry. There are arches from the top of one column to the 
other. The place is tall enough to have had three stories for horses, 
but they never had any woodwork in that country capable of hold- 
ing such a weight, and there is no evidence that there was ever 
intended to be but the one floor on the ground. 1 could see nothing 
that indicated that the place was intended for a stable, but I sup- 
pose it was, as there was no other theory about it. It may have 
been that stone was taken out of that place to build the walls of 
Jerusalem, but there was no evidence of that, as there probably 
would have been had that been so and nobody said anything about 
that. On the other hand Solomon's quarry is a place where he 
evidently got an enormous amount of stone of large size, almost 
certainlv for building some parts of the walls of Jerusalem. 

We saw the tombs of Zecharias and of Absalom and St. James. 
We were shown the Valley of Jehosaphat. The Mohammedans say 
this is the place where hell is going to be. Mohammed is going to 
stretch a wire from the top of the wall around Jerusalem at a point 
near the Mosque of Omar and fasten the other end of the wire to 



180 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OKIEXT 



a mountain on the other side of the valley and all the people who 
have ever lived will have to go to Jerusalem to try their luck 
walking that wire. All who can not walk it will fall off into hell, 
but all who have been faithful to Mohammed will walk across and 
will be saved. I suppose circus tight rope performers will stand 
an unusually good chance to get to the Mohammedan heaven. 

When the guide was telling about the Mohammedan hell 
Sweeny tried to stop him. seeming to think it was sacrilege to 
listen to a man talk that way : but Sweeny had told me that he 
believed and hoped there was'a hell, and that he hoped he himself 
would go to hell if he was not a true Christian. 

We saw from that part of the wall of Jerusalem the Valley of 
Cedron and one of the two places about which the Catholics and 
Protestants dispute as to which is the garden of Gethsemane. From 
that point we saw a dome on a Prussian church that was exceedingly 
beautiful and seemed to have its entire surface gilded. 

We saw the place where Jesus rode on the ass. or the ass and 
her colt, as he came into Jerusalem, when the people were crying 
Hosanna, and proclaiming him King. To connive at that recep- 
tion bv the people was the worst job that Jesus ever did. It was 
that kind of" procedure that enabled the Jews to make the Romans 
believe that Jesus was plotting to be King of Judea, and that made 
the Eomans willing to have him crucified, or made the Eoman 
ruler. Pilate, so vacillate about the propriety of crucifying him. 
that it seems doubtful whether or not the crucifixion of Jesus really 
killed him. While the guide was showing us the place where Jesus 
rode on that entry into Jerusalem. I called his attention,, respect- 
fullv. to the fact that one account of that ride, in the X. T. 
seemed to indicate that Jesus rode only one ass into the city of 
Jerusalem and another account seemed to say that he rode an ass 
and her colt, at the same time, into Jerusalem, and I asked him 
which of the two accounts the people of Jerusalem accepted as^ the 
true one. Ephraim Aboosln who was then guiding us. said ' W e 
believe both/*'' I supposed some of the party would laugh as if they 
thought Ephraim had caught me in a wily trick to entangle him in 
a religions argument. But nobody laughed, or seemed to think 
my question was an unfair one, and. soon after a lady said to 
me, "You are the only one in the crowd who understands these 
things.'*'* and mv good friend that I always think of as the whisky 
bottle woman, said she would rather have me as an escort than 
anv man on the boat. • 

Ephraim showed us that the gate of Jerusalem through which 
Christ rode, on that occasion had been stopped up with rock, and 
said it would not be opened again until Christ came again. 



DOG fennel in the orient 



181 



This may be true. The gate looks. like it may have been closed up 
for keeps. . _ . 

We saw the pool of Bethsaida and Mohammedans and Chris- 
tians seemed to believe, alike, that it was the place mentioned in 
the N. T. as the place of the miraculous healing of the blind man 
and it seemed to me that the Mohammedans believed that story just 
as the Christians do. It was strange how the Mohammedans and 
Catholics and Protestants would some times agree and some times 
disagree about things all of which seemed equally credible or 
equally incredible, and it seemed to me that there was as much 
harmony between the Mohammedans and the Protestants as there 
was between the Catholics and the Protestants. The Catholics all 
came back from, Jerusalem and from every other place they went, 
confirmed in their Christian faith by what they had seen— or, at 
least they said so— and there was hardly a Protestant on that tour, 
who did not come out of Palestine with his faith in the Christian 
religion shaken, and especially by what he or she saw in Bethlehem 
and in Jerusalem. When we got back to Joppa, to sail for Egpyt, 
Rev. Marshall said to me that ninety-nine hundredths of what we 
had seen and heard in Jerusalem was fraud, and Marshall was 
recognized as the brightest man on the boat, and everybody re- 
spected him. 

As we were coming back from the outing that day, Miss L. E. 
Rosenthal of Philadelphia, with Ephraim and me on either side of 
her, was leading the party on our way back to our hotels. We 
came along to a place where, for a considerable distance the houses 
were built across the street like that one of old Dives, so that the 
place looked like a tunnel that was only fairly high enough for a 
man to ride through the place on the back of a camel. 

There were two camels lying side by side in this place with the 
ends that they carried their tails on next to us. 

Miss Rosenthal and I came up to these two camels at the 
same time. I did not see anv owner of them about and I thought 
I would get on that one, just to say I had been on a camel and 
would not have to pay anything for it. The old camel that I pro- 
posed to ride looked as gentle as an old cow and I suppose he was, 
and he did just about like a cow would have done under the same 
circumstances. A camel saddle has a lot of poles sticking out from 
behind it to the camel's tail. Both of them were down on their 
knees as thev generally are when they have no job on hand, and 
thev have a meek look on them like they are saying their prayers 
and I supposed that nothing but an order from his owner would 
make that camel get up. I am a pretty spry old cat for a youth of 
sixty-six summers, and I pitched one leg up over one of those poles 



182 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OETEXT 



intending to do ditto with the other leg, over the other pole, but 
that durned old camel jumped up just like an old cow would do 
if she saw a fellow was going to ride her. and with one leg hung 
over that pole and with nothing else but the camel's tail to hold on 
to, that was the worst scared I got — not even excepting that ride 
in the small boats out from Jaffa- — on my whole trip to the Orient. 

That town of Jerusalem is just chuck full of miracles, and 
I am dead certain that it was a miracle that every scrap of my 
breeches was not pulled off right there before all those people. 

Miss Rosenthal went around to the side of her camel— he was 
twice as big as a Lexington circus camel — and by the time I had 
gotten myself together again the owner of the two camels put in 
an appearance to find out what was making all that commotion 
around his live stock, and he showed Miss Eosenthal how to get on 
the camel, and seemed to be saying, in Arab, that he thought I had 
escaped from a lunatic asylum, and when that old camel got up 
with Miss Eosenthal the top of her head was fifteen feet from the 
ground, and she yelled like she was scared to death, and I was 
scared for her. but she swung onto him like grim death, and now, 
believe it or not as suits yourself, I walked along beside her going 
up a hundred steps that that camel walked up with that woman on 
him. All the Cookies shouted and laughed and a crowd of heathen 
Arabs joined the party and the whole gang laughed, and that 
Philadelphia girl from the top of that camel waved her hat and 
yelled out "Everybody subscribe for Dog Fennel in the Orient," 
and I told that girl that that was a boss advertisemnet — though, 
of course, the Arabs could not understand her — and that I was 
going to put that in my book. 

I am not going to say this now. to hurt the feelings of my 
Christian friends, for I have many such whose friendship I prize, 
but I could not help thinking during that girl's ride, how easily 
possible it might have been for Jesus to get up a crowd, if he came 
riding into Jerusalem on two donkeys at once. I have no way of 
explaining that ride that Jesus took on those two donkeys at the 
same time except on the supposition that it was a very peculiar 
ride. I suppose I must have seen 10,000 donkeys rides but I did 
not see anvbodv ride two of them at once. 



CHAPTER VI. 



On March 6th, the division of Cookies that I was with started 
for Jericho, the Dead Sea and the Jordon. We would want to go 
to different places and spend different lengths of time in them 
so that we had to arrange when we first contracted with the Cooks, 
as to what places we would go and how long stay there, but they 
were accommodating and let almost anybody change that wanted to. 
There were sixty-three carriages that started on the trip to Jericho 
at that time, carrying about two hundred of us. As we passed out 
of Jerusalem that day I saw, waiting to get into one of the gates 
the largest drove of camels and donkeys I ever saw. There were 
about 500 of each. The camels were all down on their knees, and 
I think they were working their jaws like they were chewing to- 
bacco. I believe it is this habit of chewing without having hoofs 
like cows, that makes the Bible say camels must not be eaten. A 
camel is a lazy looking thing but he can always get up and hump 
himself; he's built that way. Jericho is thirty miles off and we 
met many strings of camels, from twenty to fifty in a row, each one 
tied by the head to the saddle of the one ahead of him, and the 
front camel tied to a little donkey that was leading the whole gang, 
and the donkey was some times following along behind an Arab, 
and some times just going along on his own hook, and all of the 
camels seemed to think that the donkey had more sense than an 
Arab, and I think that as a general thing the camels were right in 
that opinion. There are instances of donkeys that are intellectually 
inferior to the higher grades of Arabs, but take the donkey in his 
specialties and he has got more sense than any man in the world. 
Those Palestine donkeys can give the finest civil engineer in the 
world pointers about finding the best road from one place to an- 
other over that country. 

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho over which the carriages 
travel now is probably not more than twenty-five years old, is built 
by the government, and is a beautiful piece of engineering and 
grading and curving to get over and around mountains, but nearly 
all the time the fine new road follows the road from Jerusalem to 
Jericho that had been traveled for 3,000 years until the new road 
was built. 



184, 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



The new road would frequently cross the old one and some 
times the old road would be far above and at other times far below 
the new one, and sometimes the old road was destroyed by having 
the new one run right along it. Arabs in traveling on foot, 
their feet always being bare, except some times when they had slip- 
pers with no stockings and only a place in the slipper to stick their 
toes in, would follow the fine new road most of the time, but some 
times they would take the old road when that was the shorter way, 
though they had to walk up or down hill, or both, to go the shorter 
way. Some times the old road would climb along the side of a 
mountain on one side of a deep and precipitous gorge for a half 
mile or so, and then pass around the head of the gorge and then 
run for that distance parallel with itself on the opposite side 'of the 
gorge. In many places the old road had been chiseled out of the 
the solid rock on the -ide of a mountain and a low stone wall built 
along the edge to keep donkeys and people from falling over the 
precipices, and doubtless, in the course of time, there must have 
been hundreds of instances where donkeys and people fell off of 
those roads. In some places such a fall would be almost perpendic- 
ular for two or three hundred feet. No camel could go along the 
old road, but the new road has long droves of them. Donkeys 
could hardly, if at all, pass each other at many places on the old 
road, even without their burdens, and certainly not with their 
loads. The old road could not get muddy as it is all over stone. 
Some times when there was plenty of room there would be several 
paths making the road, but each path was of course only a foot 
path. No kind of a vehicle could pass along it. As we went along 
we frequently saw soldiers or armed police, who were well mounted 
on good horses, having swords and long guns, to protect us from 
the Bedouin Arabs, and in every camel caravan the camel drivers 
had long guns to defend themselves, and nearly every individual 
rider or walker carried his gun, and all of these were to protect 
themselves from robbery by the Bedouins. Nearly all of these guns 
looked very old, and did not appear very formidable as weapons. 
They were all very long, of the flint-lock variety and were all inlaid 
with little squares of pearls, in their stocks, from one end to the 
other. The carriages in which we rode, each had three horses 
fastened abreast. 

The first place we came to in coming out of Jerusalem on that 
trip was the garden of Gethsemane, which I had before seen from a 
distance from the walls of Jerusalem. It is about a mile from the 
wall of the city. This is one of two places that it is claimed is the 
garden of Gethsemane. I think the other one is inside the Church 
of the Holy Sepulcher, where the Catholics have arranged all the 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



185 



places in the life and death of Jesus under one roof so that you 
cannot get to see any of them without haying to pay your monev 
to see them. It is absolutely impossible that am* of those places in 
the Church of the Holy Sepulcher can be what the Catholics claim 
for them, but you pays your money and you takes your choice. With 
us the Cooks had paid for us in advance to see everything and there 
was no reason for us to have any prejudice about it, but eyen the 
G-ethsemane that we saw outside of the wall at Jerusalem did not 
have much appearance of being what was claimed for it. 

The story in the New Testament seems to be that Jesus went 
into the garden to hide himself. It seems very absurd that any one 
would try to hide in a garden any where there, when a garden 
was a public place and it was easy to hide in the mountains. That 
place shown as the garden of Gethsemane has only about a quarter 
of an acre in it. The whole thing presents the appearance of haying- 
been selected by guess from the country that surrounds it and fixed 
up within the last fifty years to exhibit as the garden of Gethse- 
mane, and they have not only fixed it up for that kind of an ex- 
hibition but they have collected right conveniently, just around 
it, a lot of side shows like the Catholics have done in the Church 
of the Holy Sepulcher. All the trees in Gethsemane are young 
and the wall around it is all new and the only place that you can 
get into it, through a strong wall which is about ten or twelve feet 
high, is at a little door about three feet high and evidently made 
that way to force one to bow in coming into the holy place. It is 
quite uncomfortable to get through; you almost have to get upon 
your knees and crawl in, and one feels inclined to quote the 
scripture "lift up your heads, ye everlasting gates, and be ye lifted 
up ye everlasting doors." 

Close by this door on the outside was a woman begging who 
was dreadfully eaten up by leprosy. All the Cookies walked 
around the poor woman as if they were afraid to touch her, and 
indeed it did seem to be dangerous. 

The little garden is planted in floweres and laid off very neatly 
in walks. There is, lying inside the garden, a black stone, and 
there is no black stone around there that is natural to the place. It 
is said that it was at this black stone that Judas betrayed Jesus. I 
think the idea is that the stone become black after the betrayal 
though nobody told me that. When we went out of the garden the 
guard stood and directed us to go out backward, this crustacean 
mode of locomotion being regarded as specially reverential, even 
when the parties are forced to do it. Of course that nonsense about 
bowing and backing out is managed by the Christians and is a 
matter of no importance to a Mohammedan. 



186 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



Close by the gate outside is shown a rock from which the Vir- 
gin Mary ascended to heaven, and upon which she dropped her 
garments when she ascended. We were not told whether or not 
anybody saw her ascend and how high she got before she took off 
her clothes. 

Elijah and the Virgin Mary took off their clothes before they 
ascended to heaven, but Jesus went to heaven with his clothees on, 
unless he left them in the cloud. 

We were told at Smyrna, in Asia Minor, that the Virgin Mary 
had died near Smyrna, so that there is quite a difference of opinion 
as to what became of her. The New Testament says nothing about 
what became of the. Virgin Mary, and as the Catholics do not en- 
dorse that Gethsemane I cannot fully agree that the Virgin Mary 
ascended to heaven from that spot. 

Near there is the place from which Jesus is said to have re- 
peated the words beginning "Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem,"' etc. The 
guide tried to repeat it and then said he could not repeat it in 
English, and I quoted it for him. and he thanked me very politely. 

C They then showed us the place where Stephen was stoned to 
death, it looked like it might have been so. That was a common 
way of conducting religious argument in those good old days, and 
there were certainly a plenty of stones lying around there now, 
a number of which may have struck the poor man, but I never 
had any respect for Paul on account of the contemptible and cow- 
ardly part he took in that performance. 

On that whole trip Sweeny and Hartman rode on the back 
seat in the carriage and I rode up in front. We quarreled nearly 
all tne time. but. like three fools, we all insisted on sticking to- 
gether. Each one of us quarreled with either of the other two about 
religion or anything elese that came up. Hartman said foxes killed 
lambs and I said they didn't and we quarreled for an hour about it. 

Really I didn't' know, but I knew that he did not know, be- 
cause he never said anything except something he did not know, 
and I opposed him just on general principles. 

I got so mad that I would not speak to him for a half hour 
and then we got into another quarrel. There were some lug black 
birds that I said were crows, almost just the same as ours in Ken- 
tucky, except that these crows were putting on some extra airs be- 
cause they had traveled in the Orient. Hartman said they were 
buzzards and I said those birds had feathers all over their heads 
and that anybody but an idiot knew that a buzzard did not have 
any feathers' on his head, and then we had it hot and heavy for 
another hour. Hartman and I finally agreed to leave it to Dr. L. 
0. Jenkins of Paris, Illinois, who was in the next carriage behind 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



187 



us as to whether they were crows or buzzards, and the Doctor said 
"they are the ravens that Elijah fed." Jenkins is the man who 
joined with me in the quarrel with Harrison about Jonah and the 
whale. 

Before Hartman and I got to quarreling, though, we had come 
to Bethany, where Lazarus and his two sisters, Mary and Martha 
lived and where Jesus sat in the parlor and talked to Mary while 
Martha was getting supper for all of them and Mary would not 
even set the table and get out the sugar and the jam and the honey, 
and get the milk and butter out of the dairy, and then Jesus de- 
cided that "Mary had chosen the better part," and any domestic 
woman will say "just like a man." I was specially glad to see 
Bethany, because that was the college where I got a large collection 
of sheepskins with Latin on them that I could not read, except a 
few words here and there, from which I gathered I was guaranteed 
to be an exceedingly learned man by a lot of gentlemen who had 
thereunto affixed the college seal and their sign manuals. 

I would guess that Bethany — the one in Palestine — had 
hardly changed any in the last thousand or two years. The houses 
are all "founded upon a rock" like that of the wise man in the 
parable, and they are all stone, low, with thick walls, and only one 
or two rooms each, with flat stone roofs and built square like big- 
boxes. The town is right on the roadside, and has about two hun- 
dred people in it, and was probably always about that size. The 
people .looked pretty poor, and dirty and lazy but I suppose they 
were doing the best they could do in that country. There was 
a goodly supply of babies and tots, and the whole town was sitting 
around to look at the Cookies and, altogether, they looked pretty 
happy. I think it is evident that Lazarus and his sisters were quite 
rich people and that all the town used to belong to them. 

Martha was the house-keeper and had plenty of money to hire 
a cook and could get a half dozen of them in two minutese by 
standing in the kitchen door and calling, and Mary , said that she 
(Marvel had to do the honors of the house when company came and 
that if Martha was so dead stuck on doing her own cooking she 
might just do it. 

The remains of the house of Lazarus are still there, but the 
family are all dead, Lazarus having died the second time — 
or at least if he ascended to heaven neither the New Testament 
nor his old neighbors seem to know anything about it. 

I have heard it said that the house of Lazarus was a three- 
story house. I do not know how anybody now can find out that it 
was three-stories, but it was evidently a good house and a very fine 
one for those days, in a little village, and Jesus used to go out there 



188 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



sparking Mary and to get something good to eat and if he had had 
money and had not been merely a carpenter's son with the facts 
about his birth a little shady, but had belonged to the aristrocracy 
and had had plenty of money, he and Mary would have made a go, 
and you never would have heard of the Christian religion. The 
walls of the house of Lazarus are still there and about three feet of 
them are standing, and the stone from the balance of it, most all 
still lying on the ground there, some of them possibly having been 
removed for building around there. The stones, I think are about 
two and one-half feet long, two feet broad and eight inches thick — 
that is my guess from memory — and the house was about forty by 
thirty feet. There is a good strong wall around it, which, from 
memory, I think looks very old. You have to come out of the yard 
of the Lazarus house on the side next to the principal part of the 
town, the Lazarus house being on the edge of the town and the 
whole town not covering more than two acres, and walk around the 
yard wall, which is about ten feet high, to the opposite side from 
the gate, to get to the tomb of Lazarus. The road around to the 
tomb is paved, and is about ten feet wide and walled on either side, 
and it is about 125 yards walk around the wall from the yard gate 
to the tomb of Lazarus. That tomb could not be constructed, to- 
day, for less than $500, and possibly twice that much, and nobody 
but a rich man for that day and quite a rich man at this day, 
would, or could, construct such a place. The bottom of that tomb 
is twenty-five feet from the surface above, and comfortable steps go 
down to it, and the room down there is ten feet square and five 
feet high, and every part of the tomb, including twenty-five or 
thirty steps, is cut out of solid rock. There is no ground for suspi- 
cion that it is not very ancient, I would say fully 1,900 years old. 
Some of these nights when the moon is not shining so that he 
could be seen, some male Irish angel is coming to that place and 
take the whole tomb and the hole too, to Rome, for, if the New 
Testament is true, that place is the place of the best authenticated 
resurrection from the dead in the whole world. There is something 
shady about all the other alleged resurrections from the dead, and 
the only chance that the infidels have to beat this case, is to say 
that Lazarus was in a fit or something of that kind. I know Mary 
said to Jesus, "by this time he (Lazarus) stinketh," but she 
may have been mistaken, or she may have learned from Jesus to 
speak in parables and may have meant that he was "in bad odor" 
with the poor people around there as is always true of a rich man a 
few days after he is dead. 

The neighbors seemed to look at us as if it was strange that peo- 
ple who seemed to have the means of living comfortably would come 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



ISO 



clear across two oceans to go down into that hole in the ground. I 
imagined that some of them would have been glad to own that old 
tomb to start a goat milk dairy in. Neither the genial Moody's 
man Ephraim, nor any of the neighbors there seemed to know any- 
thing about what became of Lazarus after he resurrected, and the 
New Testament does not say, and only one out of the four gospels 
alludes to the resurrection of Lazarus the most remarkable state- 
ment in the whole New Testament. Bethany is interesting because 
the Catholics have not yet sent a man out there to collect buck- 
sheesh from the faithful. They will probably do that in a few 
more years and then they will close up all of that door into Laza- 
rus' yard except a little one that you will have to stoop down to 
crawl through and it will soon be a fine dividend paying invest- 
ment. 

It has been so short a time since that rock from which the Vir- 
gin Mary ascended was discovered that it is well not to agitate the 
matter too much now, but if in a few more years the Catholics will 
build a high wall around that place with a door so low that you 
have to crawl in and require all visitors to crawl out backward it 
would bring much money to the church and be a great means of 
spiritual upbuilding to the pious. 

We saw the village of Abadira, where the disciples got the 
ass, or the two asses, whichever it was, that Jesus rode to Jeru- 
salem. 

We were getting along to the inn that the "good Samaritan" 
took the man to who had fallen among thieves, and Sweeny asked 
me to tell him the story about it. There were, I suppose, about 
twenty Catholics in the Moltke party and my friend, Sweeny, lis- 
tened with the rapt attention of a man who was hearing that story 
for the first time, and it evidently was new to him, and yet Sweeny 
the Boston lawyer, was the champion of the whole Catholic cause 
on the boat. He and I combined to paralyze Protestantism, and 
so I told him the whole story of the good Samaritan and the man 
who fell among thieves and explained its application. Sweeny 
came from "the hub" where the people are supposed to know it all. 
At the "Inn of the good Samaritan," as its sign called it in several 
languages, we stopped and all of us got drinks. The Arabs and 
I were the only parties that I saw fooling away their time on water. 
The inn of the good Samaritan that now stands there seems to have 
been built about the time the fine new road was, and there seems 
no reason to suppose there is any place that can be identified as that 
to which the good Samaritan carried the wounded man, and the 
story probably was told by Jesus simply as an illustration or par- 
able, the road from Jerusalem to Jericho being selected because 



190 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE OEIEXT 



that was a road famous for rohhers. and that seems to be its reputa- 
tion to this day. 

I heard one of our party, that day. say to another man. that he 
had heard my two carriage companions compliment me very highly, 
and to this day. for all that Ave quarreled, and as ugly as both of 
them were. I have a warm place in my heart for both of those two 
men. Sweeny and Hartman. though I suspected all the time that 
what finally developed into a friendship between us. began by their 
wanting to use me like a guide, because I could tell them about 
the Bible and the places they were seeing, quicker than they could 
read it out of their guide books, and they both believed I would 
tell them the truth and that the guides would lie. to suit the parties 
they were with. Along there I saw some sucking camels and I 
didn't know whether to call them colts or calves. It was the first 
time I had ever heard of a young camel, and I had had an impres- 
sion that they were all born old. like Minerva. 

We were going down a long hill and I was singing for Sweeny 
and Hartman an old negro hymn that our slaves used to sing "fo 
de war."' beginning : 

"As I went down in de valley to pray. 
A studyin* about dat good ole way."' 

when quite a startling episode happened. Our road just, at that 
point, had a hill running up on our right, and a bluff about eight 
feet high on our left. AYe were going pretty fast and the carriages 
making a good deal of noise and the carriage right ahead of us had 
in it Mr. James W. Hampton, of Denver. Colo., with his little 
grand-daughter and his niece, a splendid lady. They were all fine 
people, and old Mr. Hampton had been my roommate the night 
before. For twenty-five yards, and occupying a few seconds. I had 
seen that the three horses and that carriage were, each step and 
each turn of its wheels, getting nearer to the edge of the bluff. I 
could not talk Aral), and did not know how to attract the attention 
of the driver, but I looked, each second to see that Arab snatch 
those horses back into the road, lint I now suppose he must have 
"been asleep. One horse went over and pulled over the other two 
and then the carriage went over and threw the whole party down 
the cliff, the heavy carriage fortunately not falling on any of them. 
Sweeny's seat was lower than mine and he got to them before any- 
body else. I had to climb down from my high seat, but was the sec- 
ond one to them. Xone of the people, including the Arab driver, 
nor any of the horses, was able to get up. All of the people were 
badly hurt, but the Aral) more than any of them, as being high up 
on his seat he had further to fall. If he had not been a Moham- 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



191 



medan I would have suspected that he was "high up" in another 
sense, but I remembered that all the Mohammedans and I had 
drunk water together at the inn of the good Samaritan, and I say 
this knowing that every Colonel in Kentucky will say that shows 
the danger of drinking water. The poor driver was asleep, I sup- 
pose, as I afterward saw another driver asleep, by my side, as we 
came down Mt, Vesuvius. I got to old man Hampton and found 
he was not dead, but barely conscious and I stuck a carriage cush- 
ion under his head to keep it off the rocks, and I then ran to the 
Arab, as the Cookies were gathering around the white people. I 
thought, in a flash, about that story of the good Samaritan and the 
man who fell among thieves, and as I expected to have trouble to 
get to heaven by the regular route, I thought I would get one on 
St. Peter that he could not go back on and so I stuck by that Arab. 
Sweeny being a Catholic Irishman yelled for whisky and I being 
a Prohibitionist and half Mohammedan myself, yelled for water, 
for my man that seemed to be fainting. There was plenty of whisky 
in the party, but my good friend, Mrs. Copelin — she was not much 
stuck on religion— got there first with her bottle. 

There was plenty of streams around there which in old Bible 
times used to flow with -milk and honey, but since they had quit 
that, in later days, they had never gotten into the habit of running- 
water, and every dinned one of them was as dry as the bones in the 
vision of Ezekiel, or dry as a powder horn, or a Kentucky Colonel 
or any of those proverbially dry things. So as I could not get any 
water I poured some whisky into my Arab, and he swallowed it 
like a good Christian, and didn't seem to care a durn what Moham- 
med said about it. I am the most prominent Prohibitionist in Ken- 
tucky, except Colonel Geo. A. Bain, and I am the only Kentuckian 
who was ever born that ever got a drink of whisky down a Moham- 
medan. In Borne everybody is not dead stuck on popery by a long- 
jump. One of the guides in Borne said that when Pope Gregory 
died and went to the gates of heaven to get in, he knocked at the 
gate and in answer to St. Peter's question, "Who's there ?" answer- 
ed that it was Pope Gregory. St. Peter said' "You have the keys 
of the Kingdom of heaven ; unlock the gate, yourself, and come in." 
Pope Gregory got out his key and fumbled with the lock a long 
time, but could not get the gate open. Finally St. Peter made 
the Pope pass his key in through the grating and St. Peter looked 
at it and said, "Why, that's the key to the Vatican wine cellar," 
and that Italian never did tell us whether or not that Pope ever got 
in. 

Dr. Jenkins was on hand in a few minutes and he fixed up the 
whole dumped party and being somewhat in the same fix that I was 



\ 



192 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OBIEXT 



as to his chances for heaven he worked for the Arab just as he did 
for the rest, and as we were not more than two miles from Jericho, 
we got the hurt people hauled in pretty soon. When I was in the 
penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio, I had one of the nicest times T 
ever had in my life, and a few of us preferred creditors, used to 
draw our rations at a place in there called "J ericho/' and I was very 
anxious to see how the grub in the Palestine Jericho compared 
with the grub that "Uncle Sam" gave me at the Ohio Jericho. I 
never have much money, but you know "it's better to be born lucky 
than rich/' and my tour with the Moltke cost me less than any man 
on the boat, and that long stay in Columbus did not cost me a cent, 
and the government gave me $5, and a new suit of clothes and a 
railroad ticket all the way home beside. Any man who knows how 
to stand in with people like the Cooks and our Uncle Samuel 
is all right. 

When we got to Jericho, Sweeny and I were put at the J ericho 
hotel. Sweeny was put in a room with four beds in it, and foui 
men to sleep in them, and I was put in a room with a bed all to 
myself and nobody else in the room with me. Hartman was put 
in a better hotel than ours, judging from outward appearances, but 
Sweeny and Hartman would spell each other in damning Jericho, 
so that they never let up on it for a week, and I had the nicest stay 
there — probably because it was a poor little house and reminded 
me of home — that I had seen anywhere in the Orient. 

That air from around the Dead Sea was perfectly delightful 
and I never had a more delicious sleep in my life, excepting about 
a half hour, during which a couple of Jerusalem flat tail Tom cats, 
that had gone out to Jericho for a little country recreation, got in- 
to a religious discussion about Joshua blowing down that town once 
with rams' horns and while the discussion was conducted in the 
Arab language, and I could not keep up with the argument, it did 
not have a lulling effect. 

I got onto that Barn's Horn business p. d. q. Joshua was a 
newspaper man, and he was called "General" because he was lead- 
ing the Salvation Army, and was editing this Salvation Army 
paper called the BamVHorn, and the General did not like the 
municipal management of the town just as Sweeney and Hartman 
didn't, and so General Joshau came out for seven days in editorials 
in the Barn's Horn, blowing up the town, and the fellows trans- 
lating that story from the Hebrew got the story all wrong, and the 
consequences is that we have in the English Bible, to-day, that cock 
and bull story about Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho 
with rams' horns. 

It's all stuff. I saw walls still in good shape that were old 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



1\)7 



opposed to what I say showing the absurdity of nearly all of 
these Bible stories, the preachers and the priests will accept the 
statements of Sweeny, a Boston lawyer, who has made a fortune by 
investigating evidence and the credibility of witnesses, and of all 
the 446 Cookies' of our party, I am the only one who will come 
back to America and tell his people that when we came to see these 
Bible stories on the grounds where they are said to have transpired, 
we all either recognized that they were simply enormous lies, or did 
not have the courage to contend for their truth if we thought them 
true. 

The Dead Sea is forty-seven miles long and nine and a half 
miles broad. There are four stories that I have heard about the 
Dead Sea ever since I was a young boy. One is that you cannot 
sink in its water; another is that there are beautiful, delicious 
looking apples growing on its shores and that when you bite one, 
expecting to have a delicious fruit, you find it to be all filled with 
ashes. Another is that no bird can fly over the water of the Dead 
Sea without falling dead into it; and the fourth is that the 
remains of Sodom and Gomorrah can still be seen down in the 
deep waters of the Dead Sea. 

So thoroughly have these stories been drilled into us that the 
average person who will read this will not know in advance how 
much, if any, of it is true. All of these stories I have heard from 
my childhood to prove that the story in the Bible about God having 
destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah is true, and yet if they had all beep 
true, it would not have proven that story to be true. Before I 
started to the Orient I was rather under the impression that we 
would be able to see deep down in the waters of the Dead Sea some 
old columns and other remains of cities or some rocks that had the 
appearance of the ruins of cities, deep down in the water; the 
water, as I supposed, being so clear and so abruptly deep that one 
could stand on the shore and see these ruins, or appearances of 
ruins, down in the water. And this was rather my impression 
after I had been a preacher — trained at a regular theological 
school. By the time we got to Jerusalem, however, I had heard 
so many lies about things told about in the Bible that I felt more 
satisfied that there was such a place as the Dead Sea, if, indeed, 
it was not a mirage, when I took a look at it from the top of Mt. 
Olivet in Jerusalem. Out of these four stories one is true, the 
balance being lies out of whole cloth; and that is fully as good 
as the average of the stories told about Bible things. 

The fact that you cannot sink in the water of the Dead Sea is 
true — more remarkably so than I expected to find. We all walked 
up to the edge of it in the sandy mud and stood and looked at it. 



198 



DOGr fexxel in the orient 



It seemed to me that the waves on it were running about as high 
as they would upon any body of fresh water of that size, though 
one would hardly expect they would. It was intensely salt, with v. 
little taste of bitter about it. It was just as salt as water could 
be that came off a barrel half full of salt and the balance filled with 
water. It has all the salt in it that it can hold in solution by 
keeping it stirred. 

I am going to give, now, an incident that may sound a little 
indelicate because it is the best way in indicating the density of the 
water. I did not go into it myself, not because it was too cold in 
that climate at that time. March 6th. but because I had no bathing- 
suit. There is a temporary kind of a shed about thirty feet square 
standing close to the edge of the water. The Dead Sea is 1,300 
feet below the level of the Mediterranean, and. of course, no water 
can get out of it except by evaporation : and yet the Jordon run- 
ning into it does not seem to affect the sea at all, in keeping with 
varying conditions of the Jordon. which is a stream large enough 
and deep enough to lie navigable for a small steamboat. 

It was expected that the ladies would have the use of that 
shed on the shore, but some men rushed into it and some ladies 
who wanted to bathe in the sea had to go a quarter of a mile 
further down the shore to go in. Whether or not they had bathing 
suits I do not know. Some of the men went into that shed, dis- 
robed and went out into the sea, in perfectly plain view of all the 
party equally of men and women. These men may have gone into 
that" water thinking that they would sink, somewhat like they 
would in ordinary water, and that it could therefore be done with 
some modesty. 

The only one of these I recognized was Mr. E. B. Morrison, 82 
Wall Street, Few York City. lie and his wife ate almost opposite 
me at the table on the steamer, and they were both not only 
modest people, but both unusually modest. Morrison is about 30 
years old. He waded out into the water for about forty feet, the 
water getting gradually deeper, until, at that distance from shore, 
it was about three feet deep, and, as I thought, because of its 
buoyancy he could not then wade any further. He then lay down 
on his back and swam further out into the sea. He floated on that 
water just about like an ordinary poplar saw-log would float on 
the Kentucky river— about half of its diameter, and of Morrison's 
diameter, being above the water. Not only did all of those men and 
women sit there together on the shore and look at him about fifty 
yards away, but I heard one of the women tell Morrison when he 
had come out and dressed that she took a kodak picture if him in 
the water. I had heard a great deal about the scantiness of 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



199 



bathing suits at the bathing places on the Atlantic Coast, up about 
New York, but that Dead Sea bathing laid it over anything I had 
read about. 

I am not a very bashful youth when any interest of science 
is to be subserved by a little boldness, but to look at that man in 
the sea at the same time a lot of women were doing the same thing 
was so hard on me that I got away from there and was glad to find 
Sweeny and Hartman cussing, as usual, in their impatience to get 
on and see something new. I will not at all object to looking at 
at lot of good looking mermaids standing up on the fish end of 
them in the brine, holding to looking glasses in one hand and 
combing their hair with shell combs, as mermaids are in a habit 
of doing, but I don't want any Yankee merman in mine. A day 
or two after I got home one of my neighbors said to me in hard 
earnest, no joke about it : "I understand that you saw a mermaid 
while you were gone/' I never had authorized any such under- 
standing in any of the letters that I wrote home to the Lexington 
Leader, but it was evident that I could have gotten off the orthodox 
mermaid story to a Kentucky constituency with no damage to 
my "reputation for truth and veracity/' We do some pretty tough 
things in Kentucky with our hip pocket guns, but sometimes these 
fellows have some "method in their madness." I^am not a typical 
Kentuckian ; I am not a Colonel, don't drink whisky, don't swear 
except occasionally in print, when I get mad, and don't go to horse 
races and don't go to church except when something unusual in 
theology comes along ; but if there had been a dozen Blue Grass 
Colonels standing in that party with their wives and their sweet- 
hearts, and "their sisters and their cousins and their aunts," all 
around them, there would have been at least six of them that would 
have pulled their guns and would have shot holes in Morrison. 

When I was a college boy no college speech was regarded as 
complete that did not say something about Greece and Rome, and 
about some very illusive, elusive and delusive thing which "like 
the Dead Sea apple turns to ashes in your grasp." There is no 
bogus about there having been such places as Greece and Rome; 
I know that, for they are there yet, and we saw them; but a 
search warrant for a Dead Sea apple would have to be returned 
"non est inventus" — that is, it has not yet been invented, and it's a 
little too far from Jerusalem for the Christians to go to raising 
them, for the American market, though they would be good 
Cooking apples. Pity the Garden of Eden had not been on the 
Dead Sea; never would have had all that trouble about apples. 

There is absolutely no foundation for the story about the 
Dead Sea apple. Some fellow, like Sweeny, who had never read 



200 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE ORIEXT 



the Bible, got that story about the apple in the Garden of Eden, 
a good orthodox story, the accuracy of which no sane man is going 
to & gainsay. all mixed up in his expansive Boston lawyer brain, and 
henee the story of the Dead Sea apple: but now that story is 
dead. See ? 

It is likewise a lie that no bird can fly across the Dead Sea. 
But this is true in any case where the bird cannot fly nine miles. 

I don't know whether or not there are any fish in the Dead 
Sea. I did not ask because the Arabs who know could not talk 
American, and any Christian guide or any Mohammedan guide 
who has associated much with Christians will lie so that you don't 
know any more after you ask either of them than you do before. 
Ephraim Aboosh was born a white Mohammedan and was con- 
verted to Christianity, and he combined all the lying proclivities 
of an Arab guide, a white man. and a Jerusalem Christian. 

I asked Ephraim where I would get to see Sodom and 
Gomorrah, after I saw that three feet was not deep enough to 
cover the ruins of some of the cities I had been seeing. Ephraim 
said I would see the remains of Sodom and Gomorrah as we drove 
on up the Jordan, towards the Ford of the Jordan, five miles from 
where we were. 

Sweenv, like nearly every Cookie on the boat, except some 
that were not very pious, had saved one of his whisky, wine or beer 
bottles to get some Jordan water in. They were going to take this 
water home to baptize all those brands of babies that believe in 
sprinkling. 

We had heard, away off in the Orient, what Roosevelt had said 
in the preface to that woman's book about the baby business, and 
every true Republican man and woman, especially the man. was 
going to go into the baby-raising business as soon as the Moltke got 
us home. Sweeny was so dead set on getting him a bottle of 
Jordan water that he could not be induced to wait at the Dead Sea 
any longer than was necessary to see the thing, especially after 
Morrison's swim. 

From the Dead Sea clear off' to the Ford of Jordan there 
were no "remains" of anything, except the remains of the ram m 
the shape of that sand mud. All the carriages in that country 
have brakes on them so that the drivers can go to sleep when going 
down hills. That mud piled up on these brakes until it so filled 
the space between the brakes and the fenders that the wheels would 
not turn and the poor horses were nearly pulled down. Sweeny 
and Hartman, being good Christians, damned the Arab in the 
Yankee dialect of the American language, neither of them know- 
ing their Bible says "A merciful man is merciful to his beast ;" but 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OBIENT 



193 



walls when Joshua was born, and I looked all around Jericho and 
excepting the rock that was brought there from a distance about 
ten years ago to build the new hotels there, there is not as much 
rock lying around that town as I could haul in one wheel-barrow 
load, and the town is bigger to-day than it ever was before in the 
world, and it has not more than one hundred and fifty inhabitants 
in it. 

The first evening — and when I say evening I mean it ; not 
night, like the Yankees do — that we Cookies got there we drove on 
through the town a mile and a half further out to the spring where 
Dr. Jenkins said "Elijah fed the ravens." and we didn't see enough 
rocks to pelt a woodpecker out of a cherry tree. Honor bright, I 
did not see but one rock on the road, from the time we drove into 
Jericho until we drove clean through the town out to Elijah's 
spring and back again, and that was one rock that I could lift, if I 
had to lift it or bust a hame-string, and all around that town and 
out to the Dead Sea and the Jordan for about eighteen miles drive 
you do not find any rock. I had no money to buy souvenirs, like 
the balance of the Cookies, and I brought rocks and pebbles from 
every place I went except Jericho and the Dead Sea and the Jordan 
and I didn't bring any from any of those places because there is no 
rock there, and there never was a bigger lie told than that one 
about Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho with rams' horns 
if we are to understand it as the people now in America understand 
it in the Bible. 

If there had ever been a wall around Jericho high enough to 
turn a Billy goat and Joshua had put under it all the dynamite 
that that Chicago tobacco smoking fiend ever made, and had blown 
the whole push as high as Gilroy's kite, there would be something 
there to show for it to this day. 

Then there's that spring of Elijah, and I know there is some- 
thing in that because the spring is there to this day. It's a beauti- 
ful pool, fifty feet by fifteen, and a lot of tattooed women around 
there who are good looking and don't care who knows it, but Dr. 
Jenkins was right in saying it's ''the place where Elijah fed the 
ravens." The old fellow was sensitive about his bald head and 
made the bears eat up forty-two Sunday school children for saying 
"Go it ; old billiard ball," but the little devils didn't have any right 
to worry the old fellow and he taught them a lesson that they never 
forgot when they got to be grown-up people. It was a perfectly 
natural mistake in translating the Hebrew language caused by get- 
ting the Nominative and Accusative cases so mixed that they did 
not get it right as to which it was, Elijah or the ravens that feci, 
or got fed, but just change a little as Dr. Jenkins suggests, and we 



194 DOG EEXXEL IX THE OBIEXT 



have Elijah feeding the ravens, a perfectly possible story. There 
are lots of ravens there ; we saw them. Elijah was probably a mem- 
ber of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as we 
may infer from his inclination to feed ravens and bears. 

It is eight miles from Jericho to the Dead Sea. and the next 
day we were" to go to the Dead Sea. and I was anxious to find out 
all about "Lot's wif e." In anticipation of my going to the_ Orient 
more people had asked me to bring them a piece of Lot's wife as a 
souvenir than anything I would see. I do not suppose that any of 
them believed I would ever find it. I never heard a single preacher 
or priest allude to Lot's wife as a thing that we would be liable to 
see. Even Sweeny did not believe in it, though he would believe 
the whole story implicitly if they would show him Lofs wife now 
in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, or anywhere in 
Eome if thev would tell him that an angel had brought it to Eome 
in the night. Even Mrs. McCarty, a Catholic Irish sister, poked 
fun at Lot's wife. She said "Lot's wife turned to rubber and then 
turned to salt."'" 

There were three guides. I asked one of them Ephraim 
Aboosh. about Lofs wife and he said she was away on the other side 
of the Dead Sea. ten miles off and that we would not see her. I 
asked the second guide and he said that we would not see her. I 
then found a Negro guide who spoke English better than either 
of the other two "and seemed perfectly willing to give the facts 
about Lofs wife. That Negro seemed to be about twenty-five years 
old and to have spent his life in or about J ericho, and was perfectly 
familiar with the Dead Sea, and he was willing to tell all he knew 
about it. He said that the thing that is now called Lofs wife is a 
block of salt about two feet long and two feet high. 

Onlv a week or two before I started to the Orient some one 
unknown to me. sent me a book called "Around the World on Sixty 
Dollars." It was written by Eobert Meredith, a thorough Chris- 
tian, and published in 1895. In speaking of Lofs wife, Mr. Mere- 
dith says : ''The sea was in plain view and about two miles away, 
so I thought I must be in the vicinity of Mrs. Lot, and began to 
look about for the old lady, intending to give her a call. I soon 
found her and hurried up to greet her. She is about thirty feet 
high with a head five feet in diameter and a neck of proportionate 
size, onlv very short. Although her sides were so steep I could 
hardly walk up. vet she looks too big at the ground. I had about 
concluded this was not the woman, but. when I remembered she 
lived in the days of crinoline, that dispelled all doubt."' 

Our drive from Jericho to the Dead Sea was eight miles and 
of very level ground with nothing growing on it except occasionally 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



195 



one variety of a scrubby bush about two feet high. There were 
occasionally white spots on the ground that looked about as white 
and as thick as frost on the ground. This was salt mixed with 
dirt. It was not as strong as our commercial salt but seemed to 
have "lost its savor/' like that spoken of by Jesus. It was delight- 
ful weather when we were there but there had been a rain there 
only two or three hours before we got there, and the ground was so 
sticky and so hung onto the wheels of our carriages that the horses 
could hardly pull us, and we walked the last mile to the Dead Sea. 
It was a rather hard job, for if we cleaned the mud off our feet, at 
all, as it was very hard to do, as we could not get a stick, or rock or 
shell, or anything but our fingers and pocket knives with which to 
clean them, it all stuck on again in a few steps 

The mud was about half the depth of our shoes, and though city 
people made great ado about it, it had sand in it, and was not as 
bad as common mud. Rains like that, in running over this kind 
of soil, had washed out ridges, leaving some of it in mounds of 
different shapes, the mounds generally being twenty-five or thirty 
feet high. We saw at that place probably twenty of those mounds 
in an area of twenty acres. Nobody remarked anything peculiar 
about any of them, and the guides and about 200 Cookies walked 
by them and nobody made any mention of Lot's wife. But I had 
read Meredith's book and I Avas on the lookout for Lot's wife, and 
recognized, as soon as I saw it, the particular one of these mounds 
that Meredith describes, as I have quoted it to you. Two of our 
guides had told me that Lot's wife was ten miles further on than 
we would go, and as Meredith's Lot's wife was a mile short of the 
place we did go, what is called Lot's wife according to the guides 
is eleven miles from what is Lot's wife according to Meredith. So 
far from Meredith's Lot's wife being made of salt, there is no salt 
in it, or near it, the nearest being three or four miles from there 
on the high ground where it is dry, and not being in the low and 
moist ground near Meredith's Lot's wife. The mound that 
Meredith calls Lot's wife is of soft dirt — about thirty feet high 
and that far across the base, and is shaped somewhat like a hay- 
stack, having a round knob on the top of it, from five to eight feet 
in diameter, the knob having been formed by the water cutting a 
groove around the mound about six or eight feet from the top, 
making what Meredith calls the "neck" of Lot's wife. The whole 
outfit does not look a bit more like a woman than would a haystack 
that had a big pumpkin set right on top of it. 

Anybody can see from the way in which Meredith describes 
this mound that he calls Lot's wife that, while he is not willing to 
commit himself to a serious statement that this is the Lot's wife 



196 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIEX' 



alluded to in the Bible, it will help him as a Christian writer to 
sell his book by forming a ground work for a statement to be made 
by preachers and religions propagandists, like Harrison, of the 
University of Virginia, that Lot's wife can be seen on the shores 
of the Dead Sea to this day. And yet Meredith has left himself in 
such shape that while he gets money as a defender of the Christian 
faith by supporting the story of Lot's wife, as given in the Bible, 
Old and Xew Testaments, and endorsed by Jesus Christ himself, 
he (Meredith) is still in good shape to say he was only joking when 
a man like I am comes along and exposes his deception. And vet 
what Meredith describes is the thing of all that anybody can find 
on the shores of the Dead Sea that looks most like a woman. Even 
the poor joke about "•Crinoline." made by Meredith, is not true, as 
"Crinoline"" was an invention of very modern days. 

The old family Bible upon which I was raised, printed about 
eighty years ago. had in it a picture of Lot's wife. It represented 
her as being made of white salt : but she was in the shape of a 
round column, rounded off on top. The picture and the annota- 
tions took pains not to say how high that column was. The Bible 
that I now use, that was printed in 18 71, is a large, annotated 
edition : but is careful not to say whether or not Lot's wife could 
be seen at the day it was printed. 

Anybody can see that the mound that Meredith calls Lot's 
wife has probably been washed into that shape in the last hundred 
years, possibly in the last twenty-five years, and that it may be 
all washed away in twenty years more : and yet Meredith's evidence 
of the truth of the story of Lot's wife is just as valid and reasonable 
as that in •Jerusalem that the Christians and Mohammedans offer 
in attestation of the truth of the stories of their respective teachers 
— Jesus Christ and Mohammed. Meredith's pile of dirt looks just 
as much like a woman as that place in the rock on Calvary looks 
like the track of Jesus, or the places in the big rock, in the Mosque 
of Omar look like the foot-print of Mohammed, or the finger-print 
of the -angel Gabriel. 

When we got to the Dead Sea Sweeny asked : 'Ts this the 
sea that Abraham crossed going with the Jews to Jerusalem?" 

As there is no such account as that in the Bible or in any 
other book on earth, not even a Catholic book, Sweeny was 
evidently alluding to some story that he had heard of somewhere, 
about Moses leading the Jews across the Bed Sea ; but the story 
being in the Bible, and Sweeny being a Catholic, he had gotten 
Moses and Abraham and the Dead Sea and the Bed Sea all mixed 
up. Sweeny was not joking at all. He was too devout a Catholic 
to joke about the Bible. He was in hard earnest. And yet. as 



DOG FENXEL IJS T THE ORIENT 



205 



phenomenon of Ephrianfs failure to show me the remains of 
Eahab's boarding house where Caleb and Joshua probably found 
collar buttons and Jerusalem souvenirs in the hash, on the suppo- 
sition that Ephraim was lying, and had found out that I was 
not the kind of a man to see plainly, as the pious generally do, 
that one pile of mud is Sodom and Gomorrah, just because certain 
theological subtle distinctions require that I shall see it that way, 
or be thought heretical in the event of my failure to see things as 
the general public sees them. 

The next day, March 7, we started back to Jerusalem. We 
were shown the place where Jesus fasted forty days. . That was 
the record in fasting until Dr. Tanner broke it by fasting forty- 
two days about twenty years ago. There was one thing that tended 
to confirm that story about fasting. The Devil told Jesus to make 
bread out of rocks and Jesus did not do it, and the rocks are to 
be seen there to this day— rocks enough to make bread for all 
Jerusalem from that day to this. 

We came to the Apostles' Fountain. It was not very good 
water and not very much of it. At this place we stopped for lunch 
at 1 o'clock and took our lunch in a tent that the Cooks had pre- 
pared for the Emperor William of Germany, when he had been 
traveling in that country not long before. * The tent was about 
fifty feet long and twenty feet broad. It looked as perfectly new as 
if it had been stretched the first time for our entertainment, a 
company of American queens and kings. The material of the tent 
was very heavy goods, in most brilliant colors, that were in flowers 
and many beautiful designs that hung in luxurious drapery on the 
ground. In our country rain and wind would have ruined that 
beautiful thing; but the weather does not do that way in that 
country. There was a table the full length of this tent/ on which 
were spread the most beautiful linen and elegant glass and China 
-ware, and the greatest abundance of silver for each plate. There 
was on the table in the greatest abundance every delicacy that 
would be appropriate for an elegant lunch, including wines of 
various kinds. I wanted some water. The steward insisted that it 
was not good to drink and suggested all kinds of mineral waters; 
but when I insisted upon a drink of plain natural water he sent 
a servant down the mountain side to the Apostles' Fountain and 
brought me some of it, but I think the Apostles and I were the 
only people except the Arabs that ever drank any of it. 

We got back to Jerusalem to dinner that night, and the next 
day we visited a Jewish synagogue. The people in it seemed to 
be densely ignorant. We saw the place where Jesus and his 
disciples ate their last supper and where the Holy Ghost descended 



206 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



and they spoke with different tongues, but I cannot recall the 
appearance of the place or places. I also saw the place where the 
Virgin Mary was baptized in a room about twenty by twenty-five 
feet, and the big silver basin from which she was baptized. That 
scored one for the people who believe in sprinkling for baptism. 
I am satisfied that Jesus was a Campbellite or Baptist, but his 
mother must have been a Methodist. Presbyterian or Episcopalian. 
No reasonable man ought to doubt that, Mary was sprinkled at 
her baptism, for there is a bowl there to this day that the people 
there say was used for that purpose. Then there was a well that 
Mary dropped her handkerchief into. They didn't say whether she 
did it intentionally or accidentally, or whether it was fished out 
for her, or whether the handkerchief was fresh laundried or not, 
which, of course, would make some difference to the people who 
drank water out of that well, especially if Mary had a cold at 
the time she dropped her hankerchief in the well. There is no 
mention of this handkerchief incident in the New Testament, but 
the old people in. Jerusalem remember that their parents told them 
about it, and they say that the religion of their mothers is good 
enough for them. 

Whether the Virgin Mary dropped her handkerchief in that 
well when she was a young lady just in a sportive way, to see 
if some young fellow would be gallant enough to risk getting 
drowned by climbing down to get it, or whether she dropped it m 
after she was married when she came out to get some water for 
some domestic purpose I do not know, because Ephraim did not 
tell me ; but I had no difficulty in believing the story because the 
well was there; but when Ephraim told me that that was the 
place where the Holv Ghost descended, of course I could not be 
so certain because the Ghost was not there, and the Bible makes 
no mention of his ever having left there. Then we saw the place 
where Rhoda opened the door for Peter— entirely possible because 
to this day nice young ladies open doors for gentlemen, even for 
a married gentleman as Peter was, and I think it possible that in 
Jerusalem some young lady opened a door for me. _ 

Along there I got information as to the present population ot 
Jerusalem and was told that there were 85,000 families. That is 
their crude way of taking the census. As the people are very poor 
and poor people are blessed with an abundance of children and 
the Jews have Roosevelt's ideas about raising large families, there 
must be nigh onto a million of souls in Jerusalem, not counting 
the camels that are the most soulful-looking denizens of the town 

Right along there, too, I saw a blind boy leading an old blind 
man, and I thought about Jesus calling these priests "blind leaders 



DOGr FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 207 

of the blind." Jesus may have said some things that I ought to 
lay more store by than I do, but I have a high appreciation of 
anything he said against these Jerusalem priests. They are the 
most arrant set of knaves I ever saw. I did not get to see the 
Pope this time and never saw one when I was in Europe before. 
I am guarded in my statement when I say those Jerusalem priests 
are the biggest rascals I ever saw. I was somewhat surprised when 
I came to another place where Jesus and his disciples ate the last 
supper. Two places where the last supper was eaten somehow 
' suggest to me the difficulty suggested in Mr. Gk P. R. James' 
"Two Solitary Horsemen." There are mysteries in theology that 
are insoluble by the carnal mind. It is possible that this last 
supper was eaten in two different places, one to be shown for the 
benefit of the Catholics and the other for the benefit of the non- 
Catholics. The New Testament speaks of the place of this last 
supper as having been in "an upper room," but neither of these 
rooms of the last supper is now an upper room. It may be that 
they have brought that "upper room" down stairs for the greater 
convenience of pilgrims, or it may be that in 1900 years the deposit 
of Jerusalem cats that have become defunct of their "nine lives," 
and other things that, for convenience, are just left lying in the 
streets, have covered up that house, or those houses, where the last 
supper, or two last suppers, were eaten, until only the "upper" 
story is now sticking out of the ground and the door we went 
through may formerly have been merely a window. I don't think 
any man ought to claim that there are discrepancies in the teach- 
ings of the Scriptures and of the churches when it is so easy thus 
to reconcile them. 

Then we saw a place where Peter had been imprisoned. I 
know it may sound presumptuous in me to be discovering any kind 
of parallelism between Peter and Paul and myself, but it is a fact 
that all three of us have had a phenomenal alacrity for getting 
ourselves in jail. 

Then we came to "The Jews' wailing place." I had heard 
about that for a long time and had heard lecturers tell about it 
and I had seen magic lantern views of it and I was anxious to see 
the place. I had never seen any picture of "The Jews' Wailing 
Place" that represented more than six Jews as standing there. I 
think all of these pictures of that place that I had ever seen had 
been taken by preachers and missionaries, who had, for the 
occasion, hired an extra lot of ancient Jews to come there and 
stand in a good light, and stand right still and look at the artist 
and wail until he counted ten and put the big black rag over the 
machine. We had kodaks galore and Cookies that could handle 



208 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIENT 



them so as to catch on the fly. and they could not get more than 
^ue Jew in a group at a time. 

I don think the day Ave were there could have been a good 
day for wailing. There were only two there and they did not 
seem to wail with any great energy. I could not talk Hebrew to 
them, one or two chapters of Genesis being the extent of my 
attainments in that language ; but I went up to one of them and 
by my looks said to him that I was a moneyless stranger in a 
strange land, and that if he did not charge anything for it, I 
would take it as a great kindness if he would wail some, even if 
it was only a little bit. for my special benefit so that I could say 
in a book that I was going to write, called "Dog Fennel," etc., that 
I had heard the famous Jewish wailing at their famous wailing 
place in Jerusalem ; but he looked at me like and old idiot — 
that is, lie was like an old idiot — and he didn't wail worth a cent. 
So I got tired waiting for the durned old fool to wail and I walked 
on up the wall, looking at one particular crack in the wall, and 
was trying to make some estimate of how many nails those old 
fellows" had stuex in those cracks and whether they stuck in one 
nail for each wail and when they began it, and whether or not 
they were not condemned to drive nails because once their grand- 
fathers had been too handy in driving nails into a man whose 
own job had been nail driving, and I was wondering if some live 
Yankee could not go to that town with a dray load of our nice 
bright wire nails and open a nail store along there and make a 
fortune by selling nails at ten cents apiece to old Jews to stick in 
that wall when. I noticed a noise going on behind me that I had 
thought was some fellow selling fish or camel coal (call it Camp- 
bell's Creek coal, popular variety in Kentucky if you prefer), or 
both mixed together, was really one of those old Jews that had 
got down to his job of wailing as soon as he saw I was gone. I saw 
he was right in the middle of a wail and believing he would not 
stop if I went up close to him to see how the thing was done, I 
walked up to him and took it in with eyes and ears. The noise 
that he made was very much like a combination of a Lexington 
priest saying mass — when he has an unusually large mass of some- 
thing that he wants to get off his mind, or his stomach — and the 
sound of the bagpipe as we hear it in the side-show of the "Scotch 
giant"' at a circus, and then I would add the sound of the last 
rather remote notes of a Cairo donkey when he wants the public 
to understand that he wants his dinner : but as I know that the 
majoritv of you who will read this have not been to Cairo, and 
as my friend Sweeny might take offense at this ass-ociation of 
American priests and Egyptian donkeys, we will leave the donkey 



DOG FENNEL IX THE OKIEXT 



201 



I, being a heathen, took the reins from the Arab and stopped the 
horses and the Arab and I got down and pulled the mud out with 
our fingers. Sweeny got out and looked at the situation and tramped 
around in the mud and fussed, and Hartman sat in the carriage 
and cussed and I got so mad I thought I would bust. Finally we 
got to Sodom and. Gomorrah. Every house in those two cities has 
been built exactly like Mrs. Lot was — by the rain washing ravines 
in the dirt and leaving some more solid parts of the dirt in mounds. 
The houses in Sodom and Gomorrah are all about the same size 
as Mrs. Lot, and are made out of the same kind of mud. But if 
you ever get there to see those places, as I hope you may do some 
time — but you will call once "a plenty" — you can tell Sodom or 
Gomorrah from Mrs. Lot, by the fact that in Sodom and Gomorrah 
one of these piles of mud has a square knob on the top of it, while 
Mrs. Lot has a round knob on top of her. 

We traveled along parallel with the river Jordan for five miles, 
and on an average of about a half mile from it, until we came to 
the Ford of Jordan. The river there is 150 feet wide and appar- 
ently ten feet deep. It had been raining a good shower, but it was 
only sufficient to make the water only slightly muddy. I had heard 
all my life that Jesus must have been baptized ' by sprinkling 
because the water in the Jordan was not deep enough to baptize 
by immersion and I had seen that picture at Bethlehem repre- 
senting Jesus Christ being baptized in about three inches of water. 
I have done some baptizing of the Campbellite brand, and I am 
a good swimmer — have saved my man by swimming — but I would 
not want to baptize any woman there unless we had brought along 
a supply of Moltke life preservers. I might baptize a man there, 
because I would risk my own life to get a chance to drown the man. 

A party said to me, apparently seriously, that there was a 
lady there who had come there to be baptized, and seemed to want 
to know if I would do the job. I said I would, supposing that she 
wanted to be immersed. I would not have baptized her by 
sprinkling, because sprinkling is against my religious convictions. 
I had on my store clothes, of course — $11.98 ; Moses Kaufman, 
Lexington, full suit — but I said I would baptize her. I think all 
the other preachers there were of the sprinkling brand, and I 
suppose no woman in America would be fool enough to go all the 
way to Jordan to get sprinkled. I was ready to wade in — no slang 
— right then and there,' "Just as I am, without one flea." I knew 
that with all that mud it would be awful tight on my onliest only 
wardrobe, but 111 do almost anything for a woman — baptize her 
or anything else. I did not hear that anybody objected to me on 
account of anything peculiar in my theology, but it may have 



202 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



been that the lady got "skeered" of the looks of the water and 
mud. for the water seemed to be about ten feet deep and the mud 
where we would have had to wade out seemed to be about fifteen 
feet deep. >o that if we had not got drowned in the water we might 
have got stuck in the mud and there was not a Cookie or Arab m 
the crowd that would have waded in to help us out. 

They had cut a lot of branches with leaves on them and had 
thrown them into the mud to get out into the boats, and a lot of 
the women that had pretty ankles and neighboring contiguities 
pulled up their skirts, very high, and waded out to these boats over 
these branches. I did not go because the boat ride cost a piece of 
their heathen mouev about as big as one of our quarters, and I did 
not have the money to blow in. There was a swamp there that 
showed that that river gets to be a quarter of a mile wide some 
times when it gets on a high lonesome,, and I pulled out a nice 
little knife that mv dear old neighbor. Mrs: Letitia Robb, aged 80 
years had given to my daughter, and that the latter had loaned 
ine and cut me a walking stick from the banks of the Jordan. It 
was an awfully muddy place, and the Cookies were leaving and 1 
was in a h— of a hurry, and while I was trimming the stick that 
I had cut I stumbled over the stub that I had just made by cutting 
the -tick and fell in the mud. and I came nearer cussing right 
then and there than I had done anywhere on the whole trip, except 
when old Hartman and I had that quarrel about the buzzard and 
the crow. 

I told you, through mistake, that it was where they put Paul 
in that hole in the ground at Citta Vechia that I got so dirty that 
a he Cookie told me it would cost me a dollar to get my clothes 
cleaned and I told him I would let it all stay on there until I got 
back to Kentucky before I would pay that for it. but I now remem- 
ber that it was when I fell down in the mud 011 the banks of Jordan 
that that Cookie said that, and I was mad because he seemed to be 
enioving it. I had been singing for years and years : On Jordan s 
stormy banks I stand." and yet when I came to try it on it panned 
out that on Jordan's stormy banks I fell. "Let him that thinketh 
he standeth take heed lest he fall/ 

I drank some of the water there : it was cool and very good. 
I can't see where the Dead Sea gets all that salt. I suppose 
though, that sea had to be salted, for some dead things smell bad it 
they are not salted. All the pious Cookies filled their bottles with 
Jordan water and then went into a queer kind of a house, built out 
of reeds, close by, that had a flag on it that said "Cook, and 
having filled their bottles with water they filled themselves with 



DOG- FENNEL IX THE OR I EXT 



203 



wine and beer in that house, while the heathen Arabs and I con- 
tented ourselves with filling up on Jordan water. 

From the Ford of Jordan we drove back to Jericho in time 
to get ready for a nice dinner at 7 o'clock, and after dinner I went 
out and got in one of the chairs under a big tree and some ladies 
came out and joined me and we had a good time. About 9 o'clock 
that night six or eight of us, men and women, went to a tent of 
Bedouin Arabs. That fellow — Longfellow, I reckon — that wrote 
about "folding up your tent like the Arab and silently marching 
away/' was either a guy of the first water or he never had seen 
an Arab tent, or he was indulging in a very expansive spread of 
poetic license. I got from that man the idea that an Arab's tent 
was like one of those little things like the Yankee soldier can 
"fold up" and carry on top of his knapsack; but the dry-goods — 
that is when it isn't raining — in an Arab's tent would weigh about 
500 pounds. An Arab's tent is about forty feet square and nine 
feet high and it is covered all over and around the sides with 
goods made of camel's hair, and the goods is about an inch thick, 
and an average Arab tent is a hundred years old, I would guess, 
and some of them look like they had been where they are ever since 
Joshua passed through that country concerting on his cornet 
band. 

There were about twenty Arabs in that tent, ranging all the 
way from very antiquated beldames down to a new arrival of two 
days since. The young one was wrapped from its head to its toes 
just like an Egyptian mummy, bandaged up so tight that it 
could not cry, and how it could draw its rations I could not see. 
It was about as big as a premium Irish potato, but didn't look near 
as much like a baby as some potatoes I have seen. You can see 
eyes in a potato, but I could not find any eyes in that thing. Its 
mother seemed to be about 15 years old and was lying on a blanket 
in the dust. The dust didn't seem to hurt the Arabs, but a dust 
like that will kill hogs in Kentucky as quick as hog cholera. The 
doting grand-parents for three or four generations back passed 
around the baby. I took it when my time came and looked at it, 
taking pains not to let it fall in the fire of camel coal that was 
"burning in the middle and around which we were standing. I did 
not kiss the baby; I was not a candidate for office in that part 
'of the country. Then old great-grand-ma Arab poured some coffee 
into, a brass cup that looked like it might have been clean when it 
v^as made, a hundred or two years ago. Everybody passed it, and 
all voted that I was the one in the party to sample it. I didn't 
■exactly understand that this was in compliment to my age, but 
I rather got the idea that they thought if it killed any of us it 



204 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



had better be the one of the party who probably had the shortest 
time to live: and it would look like rejecting the family hospitality 
for none of us to drink it. I know it was coffee because the guide 
said so. It had one fine quality as a drink for a large family; a 
little of it went a long way. I thought the Cookies probably^ had 
another idea about it. It is commonly understood that one of the 
peculiarities of the Bedouin Arab's hospitality is that they will 
kindly entertain a stranger, and then meet him out m the moun- 
tains 'and rob him of his money, and all the Cookies knew that all 
Bedouin Arabs in Palestine could not get any money out of me. 
They may have seen me victimized in some respects, but getting 
anv monev out of me was not one of these respects. Then the 
Arab children heard that we were there, and forty or fifty of them 
called on us and danced by the light of the moon— I think the 
moon was shining that night, in that country, at least— and they 
sang some very peculiar music in Arab. Some fellow said: 
-Music is the same in all 'languages," but the fellow who said that 
knew about as much about music in the Arab language as that 
other fellow knew about folding up Arab tents. I would just about 
a- soon undertake to fold up a small tobacco barn and silently 
march away as to fold up that Bedouin Arab's tent and march away 
with it with anything any more silent than a railroad freight car 
I forgot to mention that at the dinner table that night I found 
myself unexpectedly, delivering to an audience of about fifty 
Cookies an improvised lecture on "The Seven Wonders of the 

World." ■' , „ n i 

I also forgot to mention that after the children got through 
singing and dancing at the Bedouin Arab's quarters they went 
around among the Cookies and in the course of their remarks made 
many allusions to "Imcksheesh." 

Ephraim repeatedly promised to take me to see the bouse^f 
Rahab the lady who kept the boarding house at the sign of The 
Red String/' where Caleb and Joshua called one night when they 
went into "that town before Joshua blew it up with rams horns. 
It se^ms a little unusual that the commanding generals ot any 
armv could go bv themselves into a town and come out again 
without anv trouble, but had to blow up the walls with rams horns 
to get in with a whole army. It may have been that away back 
in those days Joshua battered down the walls of some town with 
a battering 'ram. that had on it the iron head of a ram with horns 
on it, and some Boston lawyer, like Sweeny, got the story mixed 
up in his mind and. knowing that horns were things to .low, • wott 
that story in the Bible making it appear that Joshua blew down 
the walls of that town with rams' horns. I can only explain the 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



209 



out. That old J ew was wailing in Hebrew ; another support of the 
proverb that "music is the same in all languages/' 

I was told by a Virginia Cookie of the peculiar name of 
Smith, whose pride was his theological lore, what the Jew was 
saying, but I can only remember that among the remarks he was 
making to the Lord was that "The glorv of Jerusalem had 
departed," and this was true, if there ever had been any glory 
about that town, for there was none of it there when we were 
there. I soon afterward learned that the learned Virginia college 
President Smith had just read that day in Baedaker's guide book 
what that Jew was saying, for they all say the written formula 
that that Jew was reading out of some kind of a book, written 
backward, that he used like an Episcopalian or Catholic priest 
does his prayer book. Haec fabula docet: $2,50 invested in a 
Baedaker makes a profound Hebrew scholar when the absence of 
the $2.50 makes a country bumpkin with his hair full of hayseed 
and dog fennel. 

I asked Ephraim the interpretation of the vision of the nails 
and he said that when a Jew pilgrim came to that town and went 
to that place to wail he stuck a nail in one of these cracks to keep 
the ^ Lord from forgetting him until he got back next time. I 
don't think that any of those nails can be over 1800 years old, 
because the glory didn't depart from Jerusalem until some time 
m the second century, A. D., when Titus came there and kicked 
the stuffing out of Jerusalem and murdered a million Jews just as 
the Jews had murdered the Canaanites. The Jews were fighting 
under the Hebrew God, with a big G, and Titus was fighting under 
the Roman god, with a little g, and it was tit for tat between them, 
but when two first-class .gods get into a theological discussion their 
parisioners always have trouble. It seems .to me that the wail of 
J ew is on the wane and that since St. Peter came into the manage- 
ment of things in Jerusalem the Jew is petering out. They say 
these Jews kissed those old rocks in that wall. If they did I did 
not see them do it, and if they did anything of that sort as 
enthusiastically as we used to go for our best girl in our younger 
days, I would have heard from it. I think the Jews have seen 
Catholic Sweenies kissing the rocks around Jerusalem until the 
. Jew, like Othello, thinks his "occupation has gone," and has let 
up on it. I measured some of the rocks in that wall; they were 
nine feet long and three feet thick and I could not see how far 
they went back into the wall. The walls were about thirty feet 
high and were built on both sides of a passage of some kind about 
thirty feet wide, and the place seemed to be near the center of 
Jerusalem, and not on the oui^ide of the city wall that is now all 



210 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



around Jerusalem, as I had supposed their wailing place to be. 
With a wall thirty feet high all around Jerusalem and with two 
accessible sides to it, I could not see why the Jews came from all 
over the town to wail at that particular place. . 

We saw the palace of Herod, or at least what is left of it. 
There were growing in it cactus plants as large as my body, that 
seemed to have grown there "volunteer." They looked like they 
might be a hundred years old. We saw Tophet. the Jewish hell. 
It did not seem to be such a hell of a place as you might imagine. 
They already have two hells in Jerusalem and a place where 
Mohammed is going to start another one when he gets back. 
Jerusalem is the best place to start a first-class hell that I ever 
saw: so little change would be necessary because so much of the 
preliminary work has already been done. 

We saw Solomon's quarry from which lie got the stone to 
build the walls of Jerusalem. Solomon has the reputation of 
having had great wisdom, but. sometimes, he had a strange way 
of showing it. The Jews were great fellows for working m stone. 
Rocks ancftheologv. two hard subjects, are all that there is 01 ever 
was, about Jerusalem for anybody to work in. The idea of killing 
two birds with one stone seems to be a popular one among the Jews. 
When Solomon opened that quarry he picked a place where the . 
.tone "dips," as geologists call it ; that is the strata slant down 
into the ground at an angle almost the half of a right angle. His 
scheme was to get out tie stone for building the walls of Jerusalem, 
and at the same time leave an immense hole in the ground into 
which the inhabitants of the city might flee in case an enemy got 
into the city When Titus, therefore, who was the Stonewall 
Jackson for Vespasian, who was the old Mars Bob Lee of the 
scrimmage, got into Jerusalem a hundred thousand Jews went into 
Solomon's big hole and as they could not pull the hole m with 
them old Stonewall Titus piled an immense amount of iuel over 
the mouth of the mine, struck a match on the seat of his breeches 
and touched it off, and smothered 100.000 Jews in there at one 
time. They were little things like that that gave Solomon the 
reputation of belonging to the "smart set." 

I don't believe I ever saw any hole in the ground except the 
Mammoth Cave in Kentucky that would hold 100,000 men, 
but Solomon's quarry at Jerusalem is an awful big hole m the 
ground It goes back 1.000 feet and has one room m it that is 
190 by 100 feet, but the debris from dressing the stone has tilled 
it up so that you cannot tell how deep it is. There are a dozen or 
^o 4one* lyino- there now that are dressed ready for building, but 
are lying where they were finished, never having been moved from 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



211 



there. These stones are about six feet by three by three. One of 
these stones has been left on the solid face of the stone in the 
quarry so that it shows how the stones were gotten out. A straight, 
perpendicular groove, about four inches wide, has been cut, appar- 
ently with a hammer and chisel, both in the hands of a single man, 
from the roof of the quarry down to the floor at that place and 
then when a similar groove was cut across the top and across the 
bottom of that stone it was ready to be prized off. We were told 
that those stones were prized off by driving in dry wooden wedges 
and then wetting the wedges so that in swelling they would prize 
the stone off. I think that is simply a popular fallacy and that 
those blocks were prized off by driving iron wedges into those 
grooves. We were given wax candles to go back into the quarry. 
It is a very wonderful place. 

Strange what ideas do come into the minds of the unregen- 
erate when viewing holy things. As I climbed down the hill in 
that quarry I was thinking of a verse of my childhood days : 

"Solomon was a wise man, 

Eve was another ; 
Abel was a wicked man, 

Tause he killed his mother." 

We went to the tombs of all the Kings of Israel. It is all cut 
out of the solid rock with a long flight of thirty or forty steps, 
all cut also out of the solid rock, going down to the sepulchers. 
These are all cut in one great enclosure cut thirty or forty feet 
down in the solid stone, the whole thing occupying a space about a 
hundred feet square. Down in this space on the opposite side 
from where the Kings were all buried is a tomb made by Queen 
Helen, -±00 B. C, for her twenty-five children. That woman was 
one after Eoosevelt's own heart. In front of that tomb is a 
vestibule, or porch, the roof of which is supported on a row of 
pillars and the whole thing is cut out of the solid rock. I noticed 
that rock in all such places ; it seemed to have no flaws or fissures 
or seams in it. This room in Queen Helen's vault is abundant 
for burying twenty-five people without their unpleasantly crowd- 
ing each other, and before that door is the same plan of closing 
the door of a sepulcher which was evidently the one of the 
sepulcher of Jesus cut at the foot of Mt. Calvary, but the rolling- 
stone door — which, by the way, I noticed was "a rolling stone that 
had gathered no moss" — at the door of the tomb of Helen's children 
was very much more perfectly constructed than the one at Calvary 
had been. That round stone at the tomb of Helen's children was 
probably eighteen inches thick, third thicker than the one at 



212 DOG EEXXEL IX THE ORIENT 

Calvary, and the groove in which it rolled was three or four feet 
deep go that as soon as any part of the door opening into the 
sepulcher was uncovered that stone would have moved just that 
far back into that groove and there was the rolling stone now clear 
hack its full width into the groove, and it was fitted into that space 
there so perfectly and so neatly that, weighing about 3.000 pounds, 
it would have been exceedingly difficult for any number of men 
who could set to it. at once, to lift it out of there, even with good 
implements, without first breaking it up with a heavy hammer. 

The round stone at that place called the "Tombs of the 
Kings " was the only thing about the whole place that was 
separated from the solid rock. The round stone at Helen's tomb 
did not seem to me to have, by six inches, the diameter that the 
rolling stone at the Calvary tomb must have had. The groove 
being only about four inches deep at the tomb of Jesus, and the 
round stone being higher than that at the tomb of Helen, and 
thinner, made the stone at the tomb of Jesus a perfectly 
unnatural thing for an angel to sit on. 

On the other hand the stone that is now rolled away irom 
the door of the tomb of Helens children, being down in a groove in 
a platform upon which people walk in coming to the tomb and 
that groove being right along a smooth wall, that makes a back 
for the seat and the stone platform being just about the distance 
from the top of the round stone to make a comfortable and graceful 
and natural seat, it was perfectly natural that I or any other 
angel that was a little tired should walk up to that round stone 
to sit down on it. 

It never occurred to me to institute this comparison between 
the round stone at Calvary and the round stone at the tomb ot 
Helen's children until I came to write this account at my home m 
Kentucky, in the regular progress of writing this book, bimday, 
May 15 " 1903, so that I could not have acted as I then did lor 
the' purpose of writing it in this book ; but unless yon can sit flat 
down on the floor like an Arab that rolling stone at Helens tomb 
is the onlv real good place to sit down about there, and 1 now 
remember that I at once walked up to it and put my hand on it. 
I cannot remember whether or not I sat on it to rest tor a tew 
breaths just as anv other tired angel would probably have done, 
but I am almost certain that if I did not sit on it. it was ' because 
I did not have time, having to keep up with the guide that had 
started with the party into the tomb of "Helen's Babies, the 
originals of the tots that wanted to "see the wheels go round' m 
their uncle's watch. . 

NOW here is the point of the long explanation about that 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 213 



round rock. The man who wrote that story about the angel sitting 
on the stone that had been rolled away from the grave of Jesus— 
which is certainly the one out at Calvary, Sweeny "and the Pope to 
the contrary, notwithstanding — was off his nut. He had never 
seen the particular rolling stone at the grave of Jesus, and had 
seen this rolling stone at the tomb of Helen's babies, or some one 
like it, and he knew that the one, or ones, that he had seen, or 
knew about, were good places to sit on and he didn't know that 
the rolling stone at the grave of Jesus was no place to sit on, for 
man, angel, or anything else, unless an angel is a variety of fowl 
that could fly up there and roost, for a Jerusalem Tom cat couldn't 
climb upon it, and therefore when the writer, or writers, of that 
story about the resurrection of Jesus introduced the angel feature 
of the story, he, or she, made the mistake of representing the 
angel as sitting on the stone at the grave of Jesus, because he had 
seen that the stone at the grave of Helen's babies was a good thing 
to sit on. 

Angels have caused a great deal of trouble in theology in that 
country, any how, by their eternal meddling with rocks. Beside 
this angel and rock business at the tomb of Jesus, there is at 
Loretto a whole stone house that an angel brought from Palestine 
to that place one night, and the big stone steps that the angel car- 
ried from J erusalem to Eome one night, and then the big rock that 
wanted to go to heaven with Mohammed that the angel G-abriel 
pulled back. 

At the breakfast table at our hotel, in Jerusalem, Mr. F. E. 
Gregg of Denver, Colorado, told a story that I told him I would put 
in my book. We were eating some of that honey that in old Bible 
times used to flow down the mountans in large streams while 
streams of milk flowed down neighboring streams. Two Jews, 
Mose and Abe, had come to Denver and gone into the clothing store 
business. Thev tried it a year and didn't make any money and 
Mose sold out to Abe, and Mose went to California. When Mose 
had been in California three years he wrote Abe that he had made 
$100,000 by getting some hands that would work for him every 
day and Sunday too, and he sent Abe a check for $1,000, and told 
Abe to come on and see him at his hotel in New York, and then 
Mose explained to Abe that he had been in the bee business. 

Abe stuck to the clothing business in Denver, and at the end 
of three years he sent Mose a check for $2,000, and said that he was 
worth $200,000, and that he -had made it by going into the bee 
business and crossing the bees on lightning bugs so that they 
worked all night. 

The condition of Jerusalem is pitiful indeed. I have a scheme 



2U DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIENT 

for its betterment that may sound visionary to many, and the 
detail* of the materialization of which are. perhaps, fraught with 
some difficulties that I could not explain away to an adverse ques- 
tioner. But it is an extraordinary case and extraordinary interest 
in it should be taken. . 

Air W. E. Lee and wife, of Long Prairie. Minnesota, he being 
a hanker, were the most superior couple of people on the Moltke, 
regarded as all around man and woman. Neither of them regarded 
the Christian religion as having in it any element of supernatural- 
ism anv more than Mohammedanism, but recognized that there was 
good and bad in Christian* and Christianity as m all other 
' religions, and vet Air. Lee. when he and I were discussing the un- 
happy condition of Jerusalem, said he would he glad to start, with 
$500 a subscription for the benefit of the people of that city. 

Jerusalem has incomparably more in it to make human life 
miserable than anv city in the world. It has disease and ignorance 
and poverty and it is the policy of its hordes of lying priests to 
keep them in ignorance that the priests may rob them ot even the 
pittance that they mav have and with which they ought to buy food 
and raiment but both of which they have only m the scantiest 
deo-ree that these vile priests, the same gang of thieves that Jesus 
Christ damned in righteous indignation— whatever mav have been 
his own faults— mav be decked out in their gorgeous livery nl 
• heaven and stuff their rotten carcasses with costly comestibles and 
fine wines I do not blame such men as Sweeny, who was person- 
ally kind to me. anv more than I blame those poor ignorant people 
in Jerusalem. Sweeny is what he is. and Lee is what he is, be- 
cause their respective environments made them what they are. and 
I do not know that, strictly speaking, Lee is entitled to any more 
credit than Sweeny, but. all the same, the influence ot a man like 
Sweeny who devoutly believes, from the influences that he has 
drawn' in with his mother's milk, in all the gross religious super- 
stition of Jerusalem, or at least in the Catholic Christian part of 
that superstition, will go to keep these miserable people of Jerusa- 
lem iust where thev are. while the influence of a man and woman 
like Air and Airs. Lee will go to better the condition ot Jerusalem 
and o-ood and intelligent men and women, the world over, should 
interest themselves to do good in this conflict between religious sup- 
erstition and the advanced thought of the world. 

In no other place m all the earth can old women half starved 
and in rags with their bodies disfigured with leprosy, be found sit- 
ting in the ram and mud. with their bare feet on the rocks begging 
alfdav for an average of less than five cents and passed unheeded 
bv these vile lying besotted priests as no Turk would pass an old 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



215 



sick dog on the streets of Constantinople. The Mohammedan has 
immensely more sympathy for his old dogs in Constantinople than 
the Patriarch of Jerusalem has for the blind old women in the 
streets of Jerusalem, the birth-place of the Christian religion. If 
the civilized world that boasts of the beautiful influence of the 
Christian religion can do no more for Jerusalem than it is doing 
it might at least go there, and in pity, chloroform these miserable 
human beings as a humane society does for hopelessly miserable 
dogs. 

The greatest insult to human intelligence and justice and 
mercy that can be conceived of is for people of a country like ours 
to be paying money to some missionaries to live in comfort and 
luxury and elegant vagabondage outside of the walls of Jerusalem 
when all of that misery is there inside. It is a time when of all 
times in history "it is the unexpected that happens/' and it may 
be that the circumstances of my own strange life have peculiarly 
fitted me to start the sentiment in favor of some rational way of 
benefiting Jerusalem. A man like the Emperor William of Ger- 
many is not fitted for such work. He went to Jerusalem, saw 
the condition of affairs, kneeled and kissed the same old rocks that 
Sweeny did, built another fine church in Jerusalem and then came 
back to murder Chinese men, women and children because they 
did not believe in his religion. 

My town, Lexington, Ivy., is for its size the worst town in all 
the world, and for its population, 30,000, does more to demoralize 
than any place of its size in the world. It and the whole State of 
Kentucky have more suicides and murders and assassinations than 
any place, according to population in the whole world. This is 
because the chief productions of the Blue Grass Region of Ken- 
tucky are whisky, tobacco and race horses. The difference between 
the base women on Megowan Street in Lexington, whose calling 
is recognized as all proper by the Christian people of Lexington, 
and the base women that we saw af Monte Carlo is that those 
of Lexington are the common run of their calling and those at 
Monte Carlo are the pick from all over the world of their calling. 
The only remedy for this condition in Kentcky has been to build 
more Christian colleges and more fine churches and to hire more 
and finer priests and preachers. In this State of Kentucky I have 
had the honor to be regarded by thousands of people, and especially 
by the clergy, as the worst man who has ever lived in the State. 
Assassins compared with whom Czolgosz was a model citizen have 
had their clienteles of the most devoted admirers and have been 
thought infinitely more of than I am because the ordinary Ken- 
tucky Christian assassin only destroys the body while it is regarded 



216 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIENT 



that my work is to destroy the souls of men. women and children 
in eternal hell. And vet here I am making- a plea for Jerusalem, 
the birthplace of Christian religion, and it is from some principle 
of this kind that I hope to be able to attract the attention of the 
world to the condition of that city, with a view to helping them. 

Tt has been my experience that laudable enterprises are more 
easv of practical accomplishment than thev antecedently appeared 
to be. When I was 28 years old I wanted a railroad through 
Georgetown. Ky. I had more money and less sense then than I 
have now. The difficulties in the way of getting a railroad there 
seemed almost insurmountable,, but T started the idea and advanced 
as I got more light, and the result was the Queen and Crescent 
Railroad through Georgetown, from Cincinnati to Chattanooga. 
Xew Orleans and California. A boy's snowball may start an 
avalanche. 

In the same way it may be possible that what I here say may 
result in a literal "Xew Jerusalem" in Palestine. Xo Infidel, any 
niore than a Christian, can afford to have the story of Jerusalem 
wiped from the pages of history. The man who would now destroy 
the remains of Pompeii would certainly be a vandal and an 
assassin of enlightenment. Jerusalem is certainly of as much 
historical value as Pompeii, and yet Jerusalem, as it is, is not a 
fit place for an abode of human beings, and it never was. because 
there is notliing in it or around it upon which people can profit- 
ably bestow their labor. Priestcraft and religious trinkets are all 
that that town and country can ever produce, and to introduce into 
the town the improvements of modern days would simply require 
the demolition of the town. And it would be a world's loss if even 
with the rub of Aladin's lamp the most beautiful city in the world 
could be placed where Jerusalem now is. That town is now just 
as it was 2.000 Years ago. when Jesus was there, and it will he just 
like it now is 2.000 years from now unless the world does some- 
thing to help it. I honor all of those good people, including 
Booker T. Washington, eminently, who are doing what they can 
to help the Xegroes and Indians of America; common justice, to 
sav nothing of mercy, demands it. We robbed the Indian of his 
country and then robbed the Xegro if his labor to make America 
what it now is ; but the Xegroes and Indians of America are 
Kings and Queens compared with the people of Jerusalem, who are 
systematically trained by old priests to believe that the highest 
dutv of life is to kiss old Christian and Mohammedan rocks and 
support Christian and Mohammedan priests. What ought to be 
done, then, is to engage for the help of these people such rich 
philanthropists as Carnegie, the Infidel: Rockefeller, the Chris- 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OBIEXT 



217 



tian. and Rothschilds, the Jew, to combine in a scheme to help 
Jerusalem, and I believe this can be done without the ultimate 
loss of a single dollar to them, and possibly with great profit to 
them. 

Jerusalem should all be cleaned out just as Pompeii has been 
and left to be visited by searchers of information, just as Pompeii 
is, except that some of the best houses in the best parts of the 
town and possibly some of the best people of the town might be 
left there, under strict police surveillance, to conduct any intelli- 
gent and honorable business that might be desirable by the 
intelligent there. Nobody would have any right to curtail the just 
religious privileges of the Jew, Christian or Mohammedan, 'but 
the whole world would have the right to stop the flagrant super- 
stition there, in all the main part of it that is simply the robbery 
of the poor and ignorant people by the priests of all three of these 
religions. 

The aged and diseased and all physically unable to take care 
of themselves should be provided for in the' fine charitable insti- 
tions that are already established outside of the walls of 
Jerusalem, including the asylums for lepers. I saw Infidel and 
Christian men and women right at the gate of Gethsemane walk 
around a leprous woman sitting in the street, as they would around 
a snake because they were afraid to touch her. Your Dowies and 
Christian Scientists and other brands of Christian liars and fools 
will practice their healing fakes here in America where they can 
make money out of their dupes, but you never hear of them going 
to Jerusalem to tackle the lepers in that place. 

In connection with this moral and physical cleansing of the 
Augean stable of Jerusalem, and some some little in advance of 
it, there should be laid out and built, as there was a demand for it, 
in the middle of the beautiful and fertile plain of Sharon at a 
point about forty-five miles from the present city of Jerusalem, 
a city with all the modern advantages in it, the city to be called' 
"New Jerusalem/ 7 just as our greatest American city is called 
New York for old York in England. American ami European 
experts in agriculture and manufacture, with the finest machinery 
m all departments, should be sent as instructors to the people of 
this New Jerusalem, and a railway should be built from thp 
nearest good harbor on the Mediterranean to New Jerusalem. Such 
a railroad would not probably have to be more than twenty-five 
miles long and could easily be built because that half of the rail- 
road to Jerusalem runs over perfectly level ground with the 
easiest possible conditions for the building of a road, and no 
harbor can ever be made at Jaffa because the rocks there make it 



218 doc; fexxel in the orient 

dangerous. The people who now live in Jerusalem should be in- 
duced to come to Xew Jerusalem, nice, sweet, though, comparatively 
inexpensive, homes- and land for them to work on, in exchange 
for their miserable dens of masonry in which they now live in 
Jerusalem, and these able-bodied people in Xew Jerusalem could 
support by their labor, themselves and their poor in the asylums 
outside the walls at Jerusalem, while any young and able-bodied 
that may now be in Jerusalem are fast going, like their ancestry, 
into all ' the inevitable infirmities, mental, moral and physical, of 
their ancestors. 

That plain of Sharon, in which Xew Jerusalem should be 
built is. I would guess, about sixty miles long and thirty miles 
wide ; that is about the size of the Blue Grass region of Kentucky, 
the most famous agricultural region in the world. The Plain of 
Sharon is splendidly watered by streams, the sources of which are 
in the mountains of Palestine where the water falls on the rocks 
and runs off to make these streams m the plain. The Plain of 
Sharon is in a great many respects better adapted to human abode 
than is the Blue Grass region, and it lies between that plain and 
the fields of Egypt as to which is the most perfect for agricultural 
purposes that I ever saw. The plains of Egypt have to be irri- 
gated from the Xile, but this can be done cheaply and with great 
success The Plain of Sharon that literally "blossoms like the 
rose " because it is the home of the rose of Sharon, seems not to 
need' irrigation, but could, if desired, be easily irrigated from the 
streams in it, because the country is almost perfectly level 

Altogether the Plain of Sharon, taking its splendid climate, 
rich soil and abundant water for man and beast and vegetation, all 
combined, is, I believe, the finest place to live that I ever saw, so 
far as nature has done for human comfort. And yet the larger part 
of the people of that splendid country, live in houses made 01 mud 
or of the product of the camel. Women, camels, cows and donkeys 
and old men all work together in that plain, while the strong 
young men are put into the army of the Sultan to keep The Chris- 
tians 'from robbing him of that land as the Christians predecessors 
the Jews led by the God of Moses and Joshua and David and 
Solomon, tried some years since— about 2500— to rob the Philis- 
tines of that plain and couldn't make the riffle because the people 
of the plain had chariots of iron and literally "took the Jews off 
at the knees," when they got before those chariots That beautiful 
plain is now cultivated by plows made out of the fork of a tree or 
by dio-o-ino- it with short handled grubbing hoes, over which the 
laborers "do bow clown their backs always," while I poor as I am, 
have on my Kentucky farm a disk plow and self-binding reaper. 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



219 



either of which, in my sixty-sixth year, I could mount and with a 
nice umbrella over me, if necessary, do as much labor as fifty of 
those Palestine laborers are doing, and do it with pleasure to 
myself. If Socialists are fools enough to argue that what I suggest 
would throw thousands of people out of employment, I am under 
no obligation to pay any attention to a man or woman whose argu- 
ment, carried to its legitimate conclusion, demands that as a farmer 
I shall go back to the wooden mouldboard plow that my father made 
a large fortune on, or that, as an editor and publisher, I should 
throw out of my printing office my linotype and go back to sticking 
type the old-fashioned way, or that I should throw away my cylin- 
der press, run by electricity, and get a printing outfit like 'the old 
Infidel Ben Franklin used, when Franklin was certainly a greater 
man than I am, and never was put. in jail or the penitentiary in 
his whole life, and all of this because linotypes and cylinder presses 
and electricity threw out of employment thousands and thousands 
of honest and hard working men. 

The only objection made to my plan by the Cookies when I 
related it was that Palestine belonged to the Turks and that the 
Sultan would not allow any interference with his plans. Nearly 
all of those people were Northern people. I was born a slave owner 
and I remember that when the Southern people wanted to defend 
their "peculiar institution/' slavery, those Northern people said 
"Johnie, get your gun," and they spent billions of dollars and 
thousands and thousands of lives to emancipate slaves who were 
glorious freemen in comparison with the miserable men and women 
in Jerusalem that I want you to help. All reasonable concession 
and advance should be made to the Sultan to induce him to do 
what is reasonable and right for the miserable people in Jerusalem. 
We should be willing to make even greater concession than we 
would in any individual business, and then, when all reasonable 
modes of inducement had been tried, if still the Sultan was 
unmoved, as I do not think would be the case, as his generosity to 
us Cookies showed that he was fully as kind-hearted as any Chris- 
tian ruler, the slogan that should pass along the lines of the whole 
civilized world should be "Johnie get your gun, and get it p. d. q." 

Another plan to help Jerusalem is for the balance of the 
civilized world to say to England : "Go in and win, and the balance 
of us will keep hands off." And the English would do for 
J erusalem what they have all along done for Cairo and the balance 
of Egypt on the dead sly. England has her hand on the wind-pipe 
of the Sultan, and the Khedive of Egypt, professedly subject to 
the Sultan, and every other Mohammedan in Egypt is glad of it, 
and the English soldier has taken Cairo when it was like Jerusalem 



220 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



now is, and lie has made of it the city of all the world, that royalty 
from all over Europe select as the place to spend their winters, and 
Tommy Atkins has done it with his little hatchet. 

It is strange to me that a people of such intelligence as the 
English would be willing to play with as expensive a toy as royalty 
is "even if their Kings and Queens, including the present male 
incumbent, were ordinarily decent people, and it is true that 
Edward VII. is just as truly the Pope of Protestantism as Leo 
XIII is the Pope of Catholicism, and I would not give a tinker s 
damn for the difference between the two men. and my sympathies 
were with the Boers on the same principle that they are with my 
grandfather and my father, who fought the British, respectively, m 
the Revolution and the War of 1812. . 

Nothing succeeds like success. If Washington had failed hi 
reputation now would be the same as that of Wat Tyler or Benedict 
Wd. If Jefferson Davis and Oom Paul had succeeded they 
would now be two more Washington* and Lincoln and Grant would 
be "wo more Catalines. But money talks and facts speak louto 
than words, and it is true that England, like Pome, before the 



man woms. anu n m — — ? . _ r „ T 

the latter tapped her old gods for the new ones now m power 
there has always conquered only to improve the condition of those 
she conquered. ' Give England the wink on this Jerusalem quests n. 
and wXno trouble to the balance of the world she mil take care 
of Jerusalem just as she has done of Cairo, and if the "unspeakable 
Turk" does not like it he can lump it. 



CHAPTEE VII. 



Just before I came to this point, in writing this book, some 
person unknown to me sent me a copy of "The Christian Herald 

iqo. t? f , amily 1 Ma ^ zine " datecl " Xew Yor ^ A P^ 8 
i 4 fT h f 1 ele S ant P iet ™* of the interior of the 

Church of the Holy Sepulchre m Jerusalem, and the article on that 
first page is Wed: "Easter Day in Jerusalem-The Strange 
Spectacle of the 'Holy Eire/ as Described By An Eye-Witness " 

I had written my account of the Church of the Holy Sepul- 
chre before this account from this Christian paper had been sent 
to me, and I reprint this from the "Christian Herald- to show how 
strikingly it agrees with my account. The account from the 
Christian Herald" is as follows: 

Jerusalem was thronged with pilgrims. As we rode in tiumwh 
the new parts, outside the old walls, it seemed as if a i] the city 
were haying holiday ; and after passing in through the Jaffa ^ate 
the crowds became more dense. So did the dust and the heat ' 
The streets were busy. In spite of the sun, people of all 
colors and races were crowding and pushing, all hurrying to one 
point, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was the day before 
the Greek Easter, and at two o'clock, they told us, "holy fire from 
heaven would descend upon the sepulchre of Christ, as an eternal 
token of his resurrection from the dead. There were manly-look- 
ing officers and seamen from the Creek man-of-war stationed at 
Jaffa, native priests, with their queer stove-pipe hats, and tall, 
solemn fanatics from Abyssinia ; but most numerous of all were 
the multitudes of Bussian peasants, stolid and solemn, the men all 
wearing heavy beards, and long, light hair parted over meek fore- 
heads Poor peasants ! They come at enormous expense, and even 
at risk of life, thousands of weary miles, over muddy roads and in 
filthy steerages. They are so simple, so sincere, as ignorant and 
trustful dumb as the beasts. However we may condemn the priests 
we can only pity them. 1 ' 

Of course there was no place for us on the floor of the crowded 
church, but through the kindness of our consul, ten or twelve 
American gentlemen were admitted to a little archway reserved 
lor the purpose. Under the guidance of the consular dragoman 



,,,, DOG EEXXEL IX THE OtilEXT 

taS afterward that several Bussians were : tramp d to dead, 
is pr0 bably true. Sot Kltwo : but 

It M now one o clock. The pere resplendent with 
it « beginning already. The Q u ek pa tr a | fol . 

£?t£ up a chant heree and ioud ; 

and a roll of thunder comes fro, it ae wee . at fte 
who are at the consummation of their hopes, 
chant begins like this: 

"God has come to earth to-day: we are saved by his blood. 

We are glad; but the Jews are sorrowful 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 993 

stood next me, derided this as "a heathenish farce." It would be 
interesting to enter with the two patriarchs and see h a 
m the presence of this greatest of mysteries, or this create t of 
impostures. But to the multitude outside, it is all intenseh true 

The moment has come! The fire i S to be handed out tLou "b 
a hole m the side of the chapel. Near it are stationed a cc"e o 
large, muscular men. dressed only m their underelothino Then- 
are runners, strong men of the different churches, who wtif tak be 
fire and carry it to their chapels, which are scattered thro ^nou 
the great budding-Coptic. Armenian. Greek. Abyssinian Svriae 

Every one is silent now. The great bell suddenly begins cW 
mg, as if for an alarm of fire, and again the throng takes Z Tits 
weird, huiiderous chant. A spark appears at the opening ^ 
ner hghts his torch and holds it under Ins bent body, whim two 

"1 th 5',° Ugh the CTOWd and 0llt of the ch ^h- NoVn 
mounted and gallopmg toward Bethlehem. Others of the «trono- 
men light their torches and. forming wedges, they rush tCug! 
the struggling crowd and bring the fire to their chapel The 
Abyssinian team makes frantic efforts, but again and again their 
torch is put out by the opposing factions, and it is only a? the fifth 
rush that they are successful. ' 

Here and there in the multitude, men have caught the fire 
Each mlgnm has a torch made of twenty or more candles and the 
flame is passed from one to another. Hopes carry it up to gallerte 
above. Away down the long aisles lights appear. Now the whole 
building is one mass of fire and smoke. And all the while the 

cW which ' 7l? g - aBd - '"'I ^T^ thTOats are roa ™? out a 
feC-men • ^ t0 G ° d ' W1 a curse *P& their 

Poor pilgrims ! They let the smoke of the candles play around 
their faces and naked breasts. "It will not burn them," they say 
ihey will save these candles, and will light them upon festal' occa- 
sions or on the days of sacred feasts. 

The very caps with which they extinguish the flame are sacred 
and will be worn upon their deathbeds as a sure' passport to 
paradise. ■ • ^ ' lu 

rta,i/r r P ilgTims! Th f are so I'VPy now. You can see it upon 
~* e ™™ ^or they have journeyed far to see 

the Holy City and they have "lighted their candles at the very 
flame of God.' Lewis Gaston Leahy ' 

-Beirut. Svna, 



CHAPTER VIII. 



On March 9th we left Jerusalem. The last thing that I 

^^ent hack to Jafia over the same route + that Thave 
i ; \ hal this ride in small boats out to tiie 

view of it— very beautiful. f 

We sot to Alexandria on March 10th. it is b, nine. 
Tafia It has 335,000 inhabitants and a very fine harbor There 
STi fine arrangnmnt to ^coaling f t 

dragromans that came to meet us were beami . bombarde d 
of Cairo. Steam machinery was H, ^™8*™° t ^ arrange d 

itt sriAs? « -r>fet± 

th 1 f° "Lhtmr Thev t: a°U 5E"£ all look L and well 
Sthey^eem t docile and their owners seem to treat 



DOGr FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



225 



them kindly. They are generally worked singly and when they 
stop to eat and rest at noon the workmen eat and lie down and 
sleep wherever they are in the fields, and the buffalo eats and then 
goes to the canal that comes out from the Mle and gets his drink 
and then lies down so that only his head sticks out. 

From Alexandria to Cairo is 240 miles. We made the trip 
by railway. The railroad is of very perfect construction, and the 
coaches are of the English style and are very luxurious. They run 
fast and very smoothly, much of the road being along the Mle so 
as to be in sight of the river much of the time. For a considerable 
distance from Alexandria the Nile is so wide that you cannot see 
across it. The bulrushes in which the infant Moses was found 
grow along a great part of the Nile shore, and the water 
is nearly on a level with the land. These bulrushes are a round 
smooth reed about three-quarters of an inch in diameter and 
grow so thick that they make a nice place to hide a little baby, put 
into a nice tight soap box, that is set to float in the bulrushes. The 
bulrushes are about four feet high and slope up to a point. They 
are so stiff that they would keep the baby boat from floating away 
in the moderate current of the river. The bulrushes in the river 
form the only good place to hide a baby and it must have the little 
boat. It is perfectly possible that Pharoah's daughter found that 
baby perfectly accidentally, but I believe, both from the Bible story 
and the general looks of things along that river, that she knew 
where that baby was before she found it, and had good reason to 
know who its mamma was. I would not say this but for the fact 
that the young lady is dead now, and her matrimonial eligibility 
cannot be damaged by any misconstruction that may be put upon 
my remarks, and as the Pharoah family were not up on the 
American language I don't think I am liable to a suit for libel for 
what I have here written. 

We saw date farms and sugar cane growing in abundance. 
For some miles the railway ran through the shallow water on an 
embankment not more than three feet high. Thousands of wild 
ducks, if not millions, would fly away as the train approached, and 
I could but think of old G-rover Cleveland. There were many 
beautiful yellow flowers, some of which reminded me of our Amer- 
ican golden rod. There were adobe towns. I suppose it was into 
these sun-dried bricks that the "straw" was put that is mentioned 
in the Bible, and I suppose the straw was the very tough thing that 
I saw the Egyptians making matting of, and that the straw was 
cut in pieces a few inches long and mixed through mud to make 
the bricks stronger. There were no trees except palms. The 
country was perfectly level as far as the eye could reach. There 



2-26 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

were running all through the country canals running out far from 
the Nile for the double purpose of irrigation and navigation, these 
canals had on them boats about fifty feet long that were carried 
br latteen sails on yard arms sixty feet long that stood at an angle 
on short masts. Much the greater part of the time you could not 
«ee the canal so that these ships looked exactly like they were sail- 
ing through the fields of wheat and English clover 

There were beautiful smooth roads through the countrj and 
some very beautiful houses with fine grounds around them, and 
some of 'the adobe towns were exceedingly picturesque. Along 
these roads were walking many nice looking young women, who 
seemed to be healthv and happy, most of them having burdens 
carried in bundles or large trays on their heads. These burdens 
were not heavy, though sometimes quite large, and it was surprising 
how jauntily and gracefully they could carry these and how fast 
they 'could walk and talk at the same tune. 

' It is remarkable how much of their work the people do while 
sitting down. I saw men making brick who sat right down m the 
mud they were working, and yet they seemed to be cleaner than 
our American farm laborers, and not to be working hard The 
making of brick just seemed to be a natural advance from the mud- 

^ S AU Oriental people have modes of sitting down that are quite 
difiei : ent from ours. With the introduction of Europeans into 
Egvpt the native Egyptians have, to some extent learned to s 
on chairs as we do, but the natural way for the Oriental to sft 
°Lms to be to draw his feet up under him and sit on them as the 
f et li on their sides on a floor or elevated platform . when . they 
are sitting at leisure. When they sit down at work they let the 
soles of their feet remain on the ground and then they squat down 
until they sit on the ground, their legs being shut up like a jack- 
knife anil supporting the body. No American people can at all 
sit that way and yet it seems quite as natural and as restful to 
these Orientals as our mode of sitting down to us. They cut the 
Sish clover as they sit down and hind it m bundles as they go 
and then pack about 800 pounds of it on each camel and take it 
ricdit from the field to the market. That "English sweet clover, 
as 8 our Cookies called it, is quite different from our American 
clover It has a white bloom on it like our indigenous clover, but 
the balance of the plant is more like our red clover. It does not 
fall down like our clover, and. of course, is not injured by ram 
as rain is not common there. This clover is about two and one-halt 
feet high and stands perfectly straight and very thick on the 
oroundrand they only cut it as they use it or sell it. It seems to 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OKIENT 



227 



be the main food of all their live stock, even of their fine carriage 
horses when they are worked every day. On the roads the people 
ride camels, buffaloes and donkeys and some horses. The whole 
country is irrigated from the Nile. The river is about ten feet lower 
than the country during the greater part of the year and the water 
is run off from the river in large canals and these large ones 
divide into small ones, and all of this water has to be raised about 
ten feet to get into the little trenches in each field from which the 
water can be let out or shut off by a few shovelfuls of dirt removed 
from the side of one of these little trenches and then put back when 
the desired amount of water has been run out. This water is some- 
times raised from the river level by various hand appliances, one 
of these being a hollow screw that slants down into the water, but 
the most common way of raising it is by a wheel turned by a 
buffalo, generally a cow, the wheel being from ten to fifteen feet in 
diameter and having buckets, or earthen pitchers, that hold about 
three gallons each arranged on a chain that runs over the wheel 
We saw a few instances where they were doing this pumping by 
steam. The soil that is deposited by the annual overflow of the 
Nile from the water that starts 3,000 miles from there, is the very 
richest alluvial deposit. The higher this overflow the better for 
all crops and the greater the prosperity of the country, and the 
highest point to which the Nile will get at each annual overflow 
is watched with great interest by the people, and from this they 
know almost precisely, in advance, each year what will be the yield 
of their crops for that year. I saw men sowing wheat in water 
nearly up to their knees, the mode of sowing that the Bible alludes 
to when it says "cast thy bread upon the waters and it will return 
to thee after many days/ 5 One day I heard one Cookie who was 
trying to make another give to a beggar, quote that about casting 
your bread upon the water and the fellow said : "I don't like water- 
soaked bread." We saw them plowing in water over a foot deep. 
When the Nile subsides the ground bakes and great, deep, broad 
cracks run through it, but in cultivating it it pulverizes perfectly. 
All along this road there are many fine new factories. Many large 
piles of sacks of grain are left lying out on the ground as' if the 
people were not afraid of having them stolen nor of their being 
injured. I saw a great many things that showed that theft is not 
nearly so common there as it is in our country. 

At every village we would see the minarets from the mosques, 
but there seemed to be little or no appearance of Christian churches! 
I think that the Mohammedans in Egypt are a more moral people 
than the Christians in America. They do not seem to get drunk, 
or to fight, or to steal. They do a great deal of quarreling and 



228 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIENT 



disputing with each other, but they rarely come to blows, and it 
one man strikes another at all he nearly always simply slaps him 
with his open hand. When they are mad at each other instead ot 
shutting- their hands in the shape of a fist and shaking them m 
each other's faces, they stick their fingers straight out and bring 
them all together in a point and shake them in each others races, 
and the man who does the most talking is always regarded by the 
crowd as the victor. 

I saw manv crows, the heads, tails and wings of which were 
black while the balance of their plumage was a blending of blue 
and vellow. In nearly all other respects these crows are like ours 
in America. But in' the Orient, in one respect, the crows and 
pigeons are just the reverse of what we have in America The 
crows are almost as gentle as our poultry, and light on any houses 
in the cities, while the pigeons live wild in the country as our 
crows do here. The bird that in America we call a dove is unknown 
in the Orient, and what the English-speaking people there call 
doves are our commonest variety of blue pigeon. It would be truer 
to nature to paint the white dove that is said to have descended 
from heaven on the head of Jesus as a blue pigeon. 

In the fields along the road to Cairo you would see parties 
of about twenty-five farm hands all in a row digging in the fields^ 
There would be one boss to every five or six. I he bosses 
do not work, but stand in front of the laborers all the time and 
watch them. The handles of their hoes are not more than two 
and one-half feet long and they bow down very low m digging. The 
Orientals are, when straightened to run or walk, much straigl ter 
than our American people, and are much stronger and faster, and 
vet they seem to take pains to double themselves up m sitting or 
Lug The telegraph poles were all of iron. The peculiar product 
of the camel would be seen drying everywhere for fuel and it is 
almost the only fuel used for cooking in the old part of Cairo. W e 
saw in some 'places brick yards of hundreds of acres that it 
seemed must have required thousands of years to consume the im- 
mense amount of soil that had been taken from them. I suppose 
he Jews were made to work in these brick yards when hey were 
slaves, and that it was because the Egyptians increased their labor 
by requiring each man to make his number of brick and gather his 
own straw, which had formerly been furnished him, that the Jews 
arranged to run away from Egypt, and their departure was prob- 
ably not very earnestly resisted from the fact that they had leprosy 
among them. ^ pharQah |hat is Baid to hav<> been drowned in the 
Bed Sea, in the Museum in Cairo. He had been stored away m a 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE ORIEXT 



229 



pyramid. He did not look like he had ever been drowned. He 
was an awful dry looking old cuss when I saw him. He had a 
smile on his face that looked like he was amused by that bio- 
graphical sketch of him in the Bible. He seemed to regard it as a 
good joke that he knew I appreciated as I stood there looking at 
him. There were around old man Pharoah — I think they call him 
Sesostris and Barneses II.— a number of young ladies that Pharoah 
used to go to see, Saturday nights, and several of them had smiles 
on their faces and one had her hair curled and had real nice yellow 
hair. I do not think it was blondined. Embalming a smile so 
as to make it last three or four thousand years is a prettv good joke 
in the undertakers' line, but those old fellows did it just the same. 
I hardly think those people died with their smiles on their faces, 
but there was no reason why they should not do it— they did not 
believe in any hell — and that smiling expression may have been 
put on their faces by the embalmer, or it may have come there 
naturally from the shrinking of the flesh; but, any way, old 
Pharoah looked like he had just read the Bible story about his 
getting drowned in the Reel Sea, and had said: "Well, I should 
smile," and was acting accordingly. As a Prohibitionist I did not 
know what to say about Pharoah. There was no doubt about his 
being a "dry," but he took his "smile." There were some cactus 
fences ten feet high. There were some striking cases of immodesty 
among the men in their bathing in the canals as we saw them 
from the train windows, but nothing so bad as Ave saw among the 
Cookies at the Dead Sea. 

I got my first view of the Pyramids when we were about ten 
miles from Cairo, the pyramids being eight miles from Cairo in a 
line at right angle with the railway. I shall never forget that 
first view of the pyramids. I had been day-dreaming about that 
first view of the pyramids, and believing that I would see them, 
for more than fifty years, and I said to some one near me: "All 
things come to those who wait, if they wait long enough." I had 
often wondered if I would feel disappointed when I should first 
see the pyramids, and now I realized that after all of my vears 
of thinking about them and reading about them and seeing pictures 
of them, here they were at last, seen by me in my sixty-sixth year, 
through a beautiful clear air, and with my remarkablv fine eye- 
sight, and they were even more wonderful than anything I had 
ever imagined, or could have imagined. There were three things 
that we saw that impressed me more than anything else. They 
were the pyramids, the Coliseum and Mount' Vesuvius. There 
were many other things that came on fairly close behind these, 
but those three are my trinity of the world's wonders. There is 



230 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



an awe of grandeiir, a solemnity of dignity about those three things 
whose "silence is golden' 5 that tells the story of the ages that have 
swept over them and left them still standing and looking at the 
rise and fall of nations and kingdoms and religions, yea. and ot 
continents, that makes me feel like a pigmy,, morally and mtej- 
lecually and physically, as I sit here in my far-away home and 
tell about them, and that I realize ought to make me an humble 
and better man when I think of them. 

No man who is not a consummate and incorrigible ass whose 
bray is discord to every educated ear. can go and see those things 
and then come back to America to any pulpit, or tripod, or ros- 
trum, or forum, and say to the gaping fools that generally make 
the audiences for such men: "Our religion, our laws, our morals, 
our country, our men and our women are the greatest and best 
that the world ever saw." It is this brand of fools of whom Job 
said: "Xo doubt ye are the ones, and wisdom will die with you. 
The pyramids are the nearest to supernatural looking things that 
I have ever seen. As I looked at them from our tram they seemed 
more like dreams than reality. 

Cairo has a population of 750,000 inhabitants. About one- 
half of the city, that is from live to ten thousand years old. is very 
much like Jerusalem, except that Cairo is on level ground and 
evervthino- everywhere in Cairo is just as clean and nealthtul and 
happv as Jerusalem is the reverse of all of these. The old part 
of Cairo should, for its historical interest and as a kind of. kinder- 
garten for "o-rown-ups." be kept perpetually just as it now is. 
What are called "The Streets of Cairo"" at our American Worlds 
Fairs are intended to be an imitation of the old parts ot Cairo, 
and are about as good a "stagger" at a representation as would be 
practicable. The streets in old Cairo. I suppose, would average 
about twelve feet in width and. of course, such narrow streets 
could not have accommodated the crowds that thronged the Mid- 
way" at Chicao-o. and hence the streets of the imitation Cairo at 
Chicago had to be verv wide. The Chicago Cairo made as much 
noise in one dav as old Cairo would make in a hundred years. 1 he 
,hon- or what we call stores in America, are. in old Cairo, generally 
small but sometimes as large as the largest store-rooms m Lexing- 
ton, and outwardly they are unpretentious, hut internally they are 
quite ornamental in the gorgeous and brilliant colored style of the 
Orient and they are rilled with beautiful and attractive things 
designed largely for trade with tourists, and our Cookies, especially 
the women, were so dazzled by thir beauty and cheapness that those 
bazaars a- they are all called, got great amounts ot nmney from 
the people of our party, nearly all of whom were rich. The rivalry 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



231 



among the women to get "bargains" was just as great as among 
American women at an auction. You would imagine that these 
people, who had money by the barrel, would not stop to higgle 
about the price of things that they wanted, but they were all the 
time trying to "do" the shop people in trades. A woman would 
buy something for a dollar — of course, we had no such money as 
dollars and cents ; I mean their equivalents — and would be boasting 
to everybody that would listen to her, about her bargain, until she 
came across some other woman who had one just like it that she 
said cost a quarter, sometimes lying and sometimes telling the 
truth, and then that woman who had paid the dollar would fall 
into abject despondency and could neither eat nor sleep and would 
abuse the hotel and the Cooks and the Moltke and she would hire 
a fine carriage and its turnout and a guide and she would spend 
another day in the bazaar of that fellow that she would claim had 
swindled her out of seventy-five cents, and she would vilify the 
fellow awfully. The bazaar man would not know any English and 
she would have to tell the guide what to say to the Arab rascal, and, 
of course, she could not tell what her guide was saying, and I sup- 
pose that in all cases these two people, who had heard this old racket 
a million times before, would simply be talking about anything and 
everything except what the woman thought they were talking about 
and that woman was paying that guide and the carriage driver 
for their time. 

But the new part of Cairo is the most beautiful and 
delightful city in the world to live in, and therefore the aristocracy 
and royalty of all Europe go there to spend their winters. The 
Cooks divided us up among three hotels. They were the Gezira, 
Shephard's and the Grand Continental. I was at the last. They 
were all splendid, but each had its advantages and disadvantages. 
The Gezira and its grounds cost $5,000,000. A Mohammedan 
young blood built it for a palace, but it was too rich for his blood 
and he just changed it into a hotel without making any change in 
the house or the servants that attended. Sweeny was put at the 
Gezira and he just raised sand and cain and hell, and all those 
disagreeable things, because Cook's managers, Young and Dosse, 
had put him away off on the other side of the Nile, where he had 
to cross the river and come into the city every time he wanted to 
see anything. The hotel that seemed to have the most reputation 
was the ShepharcTs. It was very handsome, but not so much so 
as either of the other two, but it had, back of the hotel, grounds of 
two or three acres that were as beautiful as a fairy land. The 
Shephard's is on a part of the street where it is not \ery wide, and 
the view in front is obstructed by business houses. The Grand 



232 



DOG FENNEL IX THE OEIEXT 



Continental occupies nearly a whole square. It has a white marble 
veranda in front that is about eight feet above the pavement and 
protected by banisters, and which is 300 feet long and sixty feet 
wide. Half of that veranda was curtained in with beautifully 
colored curtains and covered with material of the same kind and 
lighted with many beautiful chandeliers, and decorated with 
elegant growing flowers and all opening into other immense rooms 
in the hotel, making a grand ball-room, one night when we had a 
ball there. The Cookies went from one to another of these hotels, 
as suited them, it being understood that each one was to eat and 
sleep where or she was assigned. That veranda had on it an 
abundance of comfortable chairs, and in front of it was the broad- 
est and most fashionable street in Cairo, and along that rolled 
the elegant carriages and automobiles and autobicycles and all 
modes of modern elegance and luxury mixed up with the strange 
carriages, or carts, or wagons, or whatever they were, upon which 
rode the Mohammedan women of old Cairo. On the opposite side 
of that wide street from us was a park of perhaps fifty acres, 
having in it many strange trees, among them the banyan. These 
banyan trees were about seventy-five feet, measured across the 
center from the ends of the limbs on each side, and they would 
have a hundred or more bodies coming down from the limbs. The 
limbs start out horizontally about twenty-five feet from the ground 
and from under the bottoms of these limbs there start down 
growths that look like straight vines and on the ends of these vines 
there is. in each case, a bunch of fine roots. This vine-shaped thing- 
grows on down to the ground and these little roots grow into the 
ground and then that vine-like thing grows into a very firm and 
hard bodv about an average of six inches in diameter and stands 
like a stiff, firm post to support the limb from which it came. I 
believe that that banyan tree thinks and that it supports itself just 
like the Mohammedans supported the roof of the Alhambra with 
those small pillars and that the banyan tree suggested to the 
Mohammedans the architecture of the Alhambra. Along m front 
of that veranda where we sat much of the time at that hotel there 
passed continually a strange panorama of people in strange cos- 
tumes. The most beautiful women I ever saw. the most of them, 
and each beautiful, were at that hotel. They were dressed very 
handsomely and in exquisite taste. They would come to that hotel, 
sometimes 1 with their gentlemen friends and sometimes without 
anv gentlemen, and sit on that veranda and order different drinks 
and ices and light repasts and eat them at the little tables on that 
veranda. But "few of them spoke English. We had a few right 
prettv women among our Cookie people, but we had a good many 



DOG FENNEL IX THE OEIEXT 



233 



that were not so awfully much so, and some of those pretty Cairo 
women made some of our Cookie women show to a bad advantage. 
The Cookie women said that all of those pretty Cairo women 
painted. I don't know; I am pretty good on the eyesight and if 
there is anything on earth that I can see plaintly it is a pretty 
woman, and I tried my bifocals on a lot of those pretty women, and 
if they painted I could not see it. But their complexions were 
absolutely perfect. They were very bright and vivacious. None of 
those women were Mohammedans. All Mohammedan women dress 
in black and have black veils that cover the whole of their faces, 
except a slit across their faces that enables you to see from the top 
of their eyebrows clown nearly to the end of the nose. Across that 
space there was a singular thing that ran from the top of the nose 
and was fastened to the veil on the end of the nose so as to hold it 
up. That thing was a piece of brass just about the length and diam- 
eter of an average shotgun cartridge, but open at both ends. But the 
brass or oride was a very deep yellow, and rough like it had been 
cast. There were around this cylinder three rings, the edges of 
which stuck out an eighth of an inch from the cylinder. Every 
Mohammedan woman had on one of those things, and half the 
women we saw were Mohammedans. These things were -all just 
alike, and all seemed bright and new. It is a rare thing that 
fashion in women's dress has in it any element of common sense, 
but that thing on those women's noses was the most unnatural 
thing I ever saw, and it seemed impossible that those women could 
have good health and wear those thick veils over their faces, 
especially in that climate, where Ave were then keeping in the shade 
in the first half of March, because it was too warm, and fighting 
some of those same old flies that Moses and the Magicians brought 
there to worry old Pharoah. Among the things that the Arabs had 
to sell, who thronged the pavement in front of the veranda, were 
fly brushes, neatly made by fastening hair from the manes or tails 
of white horses, on nice handles. I did not think the flies were any 
worse in numbers and energy with which they attend to business 
than I have seen them in Kentucky. But the philosopher, even 
of the Stoic brand, has never yet been born who could retain his 
equanimity after the same fly had lit at the same place on his nose 
fourteen times. When that happens the man who does not swear 
is a liar and a hypocrite, because he feels in his heart of hearts 
something that he has not the manly courage to utter with his 
lips, and I have no respect for a man who acts so as to try to make 
the world think that he feels one way when he feels another. 

Mark Twain is a good fellow and generally a reliable his- 
torian, but he is a liar. He says you can go out to the pyramids 



234 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OBIEXT 



and dip up a bushel of sand and let it sit fifteen minutes and half 
of it will jump out. because it is fleas. That statement is exag- 
gerated. 

The vehicles that those Mohammedan women rode on were 
curiosities. They had nothing but a pair of shafts and an axle and 
two wheels and a flat platform on top and on this platform five or 
six women would be sitting flat down, and the whole push would 
be pulled by a little donkey three feet high, with the hair on his 
legs done up in a tonsorial art that suggested that the donkey 
barber must have set up of nights to do that. That donkey, if 
he would be feeling right good, would attain a velocity of two 
miles an hour; - The woman could look at you but you couldn't do 
any good bv looking at them, and it got monotonous after you 
had examined- two or three million of those shot-gun cartridges 
they wore om their noses. When I would look at them coming by 
I would sometimes feel like yelling out: "Whoa. January !" or 
-Whoa. Emma \" or inquiring.: "Are you going all the way 
to-night?" but I thought they would not appreciate such an Occi- 
dental joke, and that they were not up on English, and I could 
not see' if they smiled, anyhow, so I refrained. 

The women that were not Mohammedans had very fine car- 
riages and very fine horses and they not only had mated horses, 
but the had match men runners that went before the horses about 
fifty yards in front, that were as much alike as the twins 
In "Comedy of Errors." What the use of these two men was I 
never did find out. The fashion of having them started somehow 
in Pharoah's time and nobody in fashionable society had had the 
eo/urage to disregard a social precedent. A pair of men would run 
about fifty yards in front of every carriage and whether the ladies 
in the carriages were shopping, or calling, or just driving for 
recreation, those two men would run just as long and as fast as 
those horses could go, and they were good horses, Arabia being 
close bv. and those men always kept the same distance from the 
horses and were followed bv the driver and carriage wherever they 
went Those two men could go that gait hours at a time, and 
talk \rab to each other as they ran just as easily as any two 
Americans can walk on a good street and converse. Those two 
men in all cases, had the same kind of costumes, but their legs 
and feet were always bare from the knees down. They were always 
verv handsomely dressed, and were always very handsome men 
They all wore red fezes with handsome tassels on them and red 
silk iackets that glistened with beautiful spangles, perfectly white 
neo-lio-ee shirts with soft loose linen cambric bosoms, and white 
linen trousers that came to the knees and the legs of which were 



DOG FEKXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



235 



so large that they looked like solid skirts. Each of these men 
carried a rod of polished' wood of mahogany color, about six feet 
long and an inch thick, caught with his lei't hand in the middle 
and carried perpendicularly in front of him. 

Funeral processions and wedding processions would pass by 
there very frequently. They were always impressive and extensive 
and you could not tell one from the other, except in the bridal 
procession the thing on wheels, in which the bride was, and which 
was wrapped all over in a long drapery glistening with brass and 
spangles, was without the thing like a stove-pipe that stuck up 
out of one end of the box, with a fancy-colored piece of goods 
tied around the end of it, when the party inside had gone dead. 
Whether they had their funeral processions and their wedding 
processions so much alike because they thought it was jolly to die. 
or because getting married was just about as serious as^ getting 
dead, I never found out. The bride is always going to the" house 
of the bridegroom and he has never seen her, and never will see 
her until after they are married. There are generally two or three 
hundred people in one of these processions, all on foot, generally 
with a dozen priests and a chorus of about twenty persons, all in 
white robes down to the ground and singing, and then there is a 
band of music. In some of these processions there will be several 
camels loaded with bread, wine, figs and dates, that are being all 
the time dispensed to the poor, as they move along and there is a 
lively scrambling among the poor to get them. Sometimes these 
processions have four or live fat, black buffalo cows which are to 
be butchered and given to the poor. 

The Khedive and his retinue of about twenty-five handsomely 
equipped cavalrymen came by there several times. There was a 
great big American flag flying from a staff on the top of our 
hotel, in compliment to the Cookies, and the Khedive, a handsome, 
jolly fellow, would gracefully salute by a wave of his hand and 
the Cookies would reply by waving hats, handkerchiefs, parasols, 
fly-brushes, newspapers, or whatever came to hand. Along on the 
pavement in f ront of that veranda there was almost a continuous 
performance of some kind, acrobats, monkeys, snakes and birds 
and many curiosities such as foreigners would probably buy. They 
would stick their trinkets up through the big marble banisters and 
the Cookies would frequently take them and pocket them and pre- 
tend that they supposed they were gifts and not to be paid for. 
but the Arab would never show any uneasiness about it and still 
hand up niore. 

The police would sometimes come along and scatter the whole 
crowd from the pavement, but as a general thing they seemed to 



236 



DOG FENNEL IX THE OEIEXT 



think it was amusement for the Cookies and profit for the Arabs 
and the police would connive at it. I saw them once do something 
that I would commend to our American people. What seemed to 
be the nearest to a serious quarrel that I saw in the Orient, except 
the triangular quarrels between old Hartman and Sweeny and me, 
occurred there between two men in front of that veranda. They 
looked like they were going to have a slapping match. If it had 
been in Lexington I would have got back into that hotel p. d. q., 
for I would have known that in about two more seconds each fellow 
would reach for his gun. A policeman was standing out in the 
street and saw the scrimmage and started at once toward them. 
I have been in a large assortment of scraps in Lexington, and I 
generally have looked for a policeman to come along as anxiously 
as old Wellington looked for "night or Blueher," but I never yet 
have known a policeman to come along until the fun (for the 
crowd) was all over. That Cairo policeman just walked up to 
those to men in a dignified manner and without any excitement. 
They stopped their quarrel when he got to them and stood there. 
The policeman asked the people who stood by to tell him. one at 
a time what they had seen and heard, and each man gave his 
testimony in a half minute. When they were through that police- 
man told one of the men to go away in one direction and the 
other to go in the opposite direction, and each obeyed him and the 
policeman walked out in the street again and took his position 
where he had been. In Lexington there would have been two 
policemen and each would have yanked his man off to the station 
and cracked him over the head with his "billy" when the maa 
resisted There would have been two police court cases for noise 
and disorder;" they would both have been fined, if they were poor 
and uninfluential men. and the public would have had to pay the 
costs of their prosecution. 

I was struck with the peculiar way in which the women 
carried their children. The child always sat astride the woman's 
shoulder, with its face to the woman's head, and the child would 
put both of its hands on the woman's head. But, of course, the 
thing of all things of greatest interest about Cairo are the pyra- 
mids and the sphinx, and so on the morning of the first day alter 
our arrival in Cairo our carriages were driven up before our hotels 
and about 200 of us, in a procession of fifty carriages, started tor 
the famous pyramids, the balance of our company who had stayed 
lono-er in Palestine not having yet arrived in Cairo. That ride was 
one'of the most memorable events of my life, and I can see it and 
feel it now almost as if I were on the road going out there. 1 got 
up with the driver, as usual. It is eight miles from Cairo to the 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



237 



pyramids and it is perhaps the most beautiful road in the world 
The weather was perfectly clear and the thermometer stood at 
about seventy-five degrees in the shade and eighty-five in the sun. 
The road is a dead level all the way from the citv until you get 
to the bluff of about 200 feet high that you ascend, beginning 
about a half mile from the foot of the nearest pyramid, Cheops, 
which is the largest of them all, and there are eighteen in all: 
That road is about sixty feet wide, measuring from the great trees 
that grow upon either side of it, and there is on it abundance of 
room for five or six carriages to drive abreast, though we all drove 
single file, and drove pretty fast. All along that road we saw going 
and coming each way, long strings of camels, laden with farm 
products generally. The trees on either side of that road are very 
large and spread as wide, as the largest elms that we have in 
America, and they make an unbroken arch of shade the whole 
length of the road, and. the road being straight and the lowest 
boughs of the trees being about thirty feet high, vou can see for 
miles along this beautiful way. Those trees seem to be of uniform 
size, about two and one-half feet in diameter at the bottom and are 
all in perfect order. They are probably fifty feet tall and there is 
not a single one missing that I noticed on either side. Along on 
one side of that road is an electric trolly car line running the 
whole distance. All the trolley cars there have first and second 
class in the same cars. The whole car is nice, but the end that is 
for the first class is all nicely cushioned and the second class is 
not. The first class fare is five cents and the second class two and 
one-half cents. These cars leave for the pyramids every ten min- 
utess and they run as fast as our fastest in America, The posts 
for the trolleys are all of iron and are very ornamental. As we 
started out we came, in the edge of the city to the bridge across 
the Nile. It was built there by the English. There are four great 
columns— two on each side, that support this bridge at its ends and 
on each of these four columns is an enormous bronze lion, the larg- 
est things in bronze animals that I ever saw. The selection of 
these lions as ornaments for that great bridge is not accidental by 
any means. By these John Bull means to say to the world that 
his lion has his paw on that river, the most famous in the world, 
and that they have come there to stay. The Turkish flag, with 
the crescent and star on it, is flying everywhere, but you can see 
that everything is managed by the British, and as soon as John 
Bull can find any excuse to quarrel with the Sultan, John will 
take all of that country from the Sultan ; but it may be that the 
masses of the people there are wise enough to see that the English 
will rule them better than they can rule themselves. If the English 



238 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



will be wise enough not to tamper with the Mohammedan religion 
tl yMiammedans ,,11 never resist the English. There are beau- 
tiful toosques now in Cairo, hut if there is any Christian church 
orJewish synagogue there at all I do not remember to have seen 
either That bridge has a draw in it that opens at certain hours of 
the dav to let the Nile boats with their long latteen sails through. 
There^ll fe from fifty to one hundred of these boats waitmg 
there to go through every time the draw is turned. 

is we went on to the pyramids we could, all the time see the 
the main two big pyramids sticking tip like two lug notches m 
the v u, t as thev look in the pictures. I finally made up m? 

nd o- av in this hook that the sizes of the pyramids had been 
" "atlv exaggerated and as much as I hated to destroy the illusion, 
f . ' p } *af well as for others, who I expected to read tins book, 
t t Tl had S to destrov some of the illusions about Palestine, 
"I o'in: o tell the plain'f acts about the pyramids and denounce 
as fraud- and liars the people who had for years been deceiving the 

pvramldsand the sphinx and 
-olacino- mvself for mv own disappointment by thinking that .those 
who read mv book would say I was the only man who had eyer 
lone there and seen those things and had come batik and told 

* ^SSd Major B. G Thomas of Le.ngton, am old 
Confederate officer, had, wrtli his order to r us book sen me $ , 
thoimh he understood that the book costs onh $1, but lie nan, in 

have had much to do with the religious traumig of both of them 

:» »»'f.': *« ~ >r> -<» <• r,~ s 

Ihat'-rL the t^ecSd That happens/' while I would not want 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 239 

even a race horse to go to the devil, I would not spend eternity 
pmmg for him if I did not meet him in heaven. 

I had that little tape line in my pocket and was going to use 
it to disprove the statements of others who had written about the 
pyramids. I noticed though, after a while, that my extra fine 
vision was affected by something like the mirage that I had read 
about on the desert. In that wonderfully clear atmosphere I saw 
the pyramids so plainly that I got the impression that they were 
much nearer me than they really were, and, therefore, as we did 
not get to the pyramids as soon as I thought we were going to do 
I discovered that I was underestimating their proportions because 
the distance to them was further than I had thought 

This same illusion keeps up even after you axe at the foot of 
the pyramids. 

When we were about a half mile from the first pyramid we 
began to ascend the bluff, on the beautifully graded but pretty steep 
road that leads up from all that immense fertile plain that is 
almost down to the level of the Nile, for thousands of miles, to the 
desert of Sahara on the edge of which the pyramids and the sphinx 
are. This desert spreads for thousands of miles also, and from the 
elevation upon which the pyramids stand you can see the desert 
stretch such an immense distance that finally you cannot tell where 
is the dividing line between the yellow sand and the yellow sky 
I his sand is very much finer than the river sands that we see in 
America. That desert sand drifts almost like snow. Even in a 
moderate breeze you can drop a handful of it as you hold it up 
five or six feet from the sand on which you stand and some of 
that sand will fall five or six feet from you. The desert is not all 
level by any means, it has hills and valleys and level land all 
sand, with nothing growing on it, of course. When along' the 
edge of the desert you find a place where there is no sand there 
is never any soil but all a solid rock that looks unlike anything 
we have m America, but it is very solid and so deep that there 
is no way of telling its thickness. In America we are accustomed 
to seeing the sand down in the valleys where the streams and the 
rams have washed it, but there as we get to the pyramids we find 
the sand some two hundred feet higher than the rich alluvial 
valley below. 

At that point .there are nine pyramids and fifteen mile* 
iurther off, up the Nile river and also in the edge of the desert 
there are nine more pyramids, but the first two that you come tc 
are much larger than any one of the others, Cheops being only a 
little larger than the next largest to it, which is about a Quarter of 
a mile away. 



240 DOG 



FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



T had always heard that the base of Cheops covered thirteen 

be 245 vards. which makes the base ot Cheops .over a 

^t^TtT^e, how high Cheops is. and one said 4Y7 feet 
I askec L two differe | ce may originate m the point that 

bottom of the natural stone which, m places, is so 

for building purposes, and it may be that^ ngiv m t he g 

Cheops this eighteen feet, on op. is counted m « ° = 

The debris around the sides of Ae P ^ J 1 ^ Attorn to measure 

;^-7- ;;; r rfc ^- and measured 
to get its height. I went up to tin i. 
what seemed to he the largest s on es I oukl «^ «i°u J 
5b that pyramid, all ot about the .am ,ue Ot con 
only get the three dimensions o .any of t hese st one y 
t .W at the comers J^^gtln he "ng, three feeOour 
V** 1 ™ * C S ie Tmllured toLontally-aBd four feet two 
ith 7 Sn a 1 f my first day there without going to see 
inches hign. l speui an * ■ , after, and was 

the second largest pyramid. T went to see t hat one att 
Lprised to find much larger stones m 1 £ tt^ 

lair pyramids than in the ^rger ^ * - ^ ^ tl? 

distressed to recall that 1 nan mil i m]ne 

but "Old Arkansaw. «^»"^ f could find near 
and he and I measured the ki rgest s ton es t ha we com 
the corner that we first came to ^he largest one wa 
feet long and eleven teet broad and five feet ^ d five 

largest stone that we saw was twentt t« t and six inc 
feet thick, bnt we could not see how far it went nto^ t 
Another was sixteen teet long and five f^hick an ^ 
a , «tf^»W3^ course of Chef- 



DOG FEXKEL IX THE OEIEXT 



241 



frin, and those above seemed to be about the same size as those in 
Cheops. 

"Old Arkansaw's" right name was G. A. Viquesney, of Little 
Rock; Arkansas. He was born in France and came to this country 
when he was young, and spoke French and English equally well 
He was a good friend to me, and is a fine gentleman, 71 years old, 
with the mental and physical activities of a boy. "Old Arkansaw" 
and I spent much of our time together. He was a great advantage 
to me in his talking French. He had provided for his family so 
that they were independent of him and he of them, and then he 
had $1,600 left and he took $600 of that to take him on that cruise. 
He also had a $300 passage, and so had plenty of money to spend. 
I suppose he had less money than anybody on the boat except me. 
We liked each other because we were both cranks, both heretics, 
both poor and both from the South. I never called him anything 
but "Arkansaw," because I could not recollect his outlandish name 
and could not pronounce it if I did recollect. 

"Arkansaw" and I started out that second trip to the pyra- 
mids to see them all ourselves, but we took along with us two ladies 
and a gentleman of our party. "Arkansaw" and I did not want 
any guide, but a guide got possession of the other three of the 
party and he and I got separated from them and did not find them 
for a long time, and he and I had to employ a guide, too, because 
if you do not have a guide they will meet you at every turn and 
want you to. hire them, and you nave to hire"one to keep the others 
away. He was a good guide, though, and showed us some Very 
strange things that "Arkansaw" and I never would have found or 
understood if we had found them, if we had not had that guide. 

When we were standing at Cheffrin we saw a party of men 
excavating. They had gone clown about forty feet in the sand, and 
only a few feet below the surface of the sand they had found a 
white marble temple covered all over in hieroglyphic writing. The 
building was in perfect preservation. I suppose people mav have 
been walking over -that building for thousands of years without 
knowing it was under their feet until it was now being excavated, 
and we Cookies may have walked in the deep sand over various 
such places without knowing that they were under our feet. The 
sand from this excavation was being carried off on the heads of 
bo}^s about thirteen years old, each boy carrying his load in a willow 
basket on his head and piling it down a "dump about fifty yards 
from the excavation. I thought it quite probable that they were 
piling that sand on the top of some building just as handsome 
and wonderful as the one they were excavating. Those boys all 
seemed happy and well, and their loads were not heavy and they 



24:2 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



seemed to be having a kind of a picnic of it. They poured the sand 
over that dump in a continuous stream. As they marched back 
and forth like a lot of ants, clearing out a hole, they were singing 
a song, and they all sang nearly all the time. They were singing 
in Arabic, of course. It's a big mistake that says "Music is the 
same in all languages.'* That Arab song did not sound like any 
music I ever heard" and I do not believe there is a man born in 
America who could make any music like it. I saw in Cairo an 
Arab band of thirty pieces, playing fine modern -classic music, but 
it was no kin to that those boys were singing. The original Arab 
music seems not to have more than two bars. I asked the guide 
what the words of their song were. He told me in Arab, but I will 
never tell vou. and then he" translated them into English and said 
they were as follows : "Coming out of the house of his father one 
man from the house of his father he wear shoes, business man ham- 
mer as man he wear clothes black and white." I could not exactly 
get onto it. even in English, especially the word "hammer/* but 
that is just what the guide said they said. 

There were near that place, lying on the sand, iron dump 
car- and rails for a little railway, arranging for an up-to-date 
excavating plant and I suppose the sand will be scooped and loaded 
by steam." and then hauled with a little engine on the railway n 
be made, and dumped down the 200-foot bluff upon which fas 
pyramids stand, so what is dumped from any excavation may not 
have to be removed for some succeeeding excavation. 

I- suppose the pyramid of Cheffrin covers eight or ten acres. 
I suppose it is about 375 feet high. For about seventy-five feet 
from the top down Cheffrin is just as it was originally built out 
from that point on down the original covering of the pyramid has 
all been taken of. and this is true of the whole of Cheops from top 
to bottom. This leaves the whole of Cheops and all of Cheffrin 
Yip to the point from which the outer coving has not been taken, 
now m the shape of stairsteps, each step being about five feet hign. 
Originally the angles in these stones were all smoothly filled m 
*o as to make each of these pyramids perfectly smooth from top 
to bottom The stones that are found there and which were evi- 
dently formerlv used to fill in these angles are of granite, white 
marble and alabaster, and possibly some other kinds. These stones 
forming this outer coating have been prized off and slided down 
the pvramids at later dates to build temples that are around the 
pyramids, the temples being so old that you cannot see that tney 
are not as old as the pvramids. The stripping of Cheops probably 
began at the top. In sliding these stones down so many have been 
broken into small pieces, or so many small pieces broken from >o 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



243 



many stones that in the middle of each side of Cheops this debris 
is piled up as high as fifty feet npon the sides of the pyramid. 
Most of this debris has been, in modern times, by excavators, duo- 
away from the pyramids, but the whole line is plain on all four 
sides of each of them and this line in each case naturally describes 
the arc of a circle, the highest point being the middle of the side 
as, of course, the most stone would roll down at the middle of 
each corner. 

No cement has eyer been used in the building of these 
pyramids. Each stone has been squared and faced and leveled, so 
that between any two horizontal surfaces you would hardly find 
more than a quarter of an inch of space though between the per- 
pendicular surfaces where one stone fits up to another, there would 
frequently be a space of an inch or so, and in some instances a 
space of two or three inches. Of course the hardest earthquake 
would not affect the pyramids. The stone of which the pyramids 
are built is of so fine a grain that it is almost a coarse marble. The 
only disintegration that I saw in any of it is on the South side 
of Cheops. That would appear to have been the effect of heat. 
There the stones have disintegrated in to a depth of about three 
inches, and, strange to say, this disintegration does not in any 
instance go nearer than two inches to the edge of the stone, and 
the line if disintegration runs regularly along parallel with the 
edges of the stones. That, to me, was an inexplicable phenomenon. 

By the time the carriage we were in had gotten to the foot of 
Cheops there were Cookies climbing up the pyramid. Nobody 
seems to go up any but Cheops, and they all take the same route 
up. They start about fifty feet from the left corner of the pyra- 
mid as you go up to the pyramid and climb up on that debris that 
forms a path about a foot wide that sticks on the face of the pyra- 
mid, and they go up that to a door from which an inclined plane 
of smooth rock goes down into the pyramid where there are two 
rooms in which were the sarcophagi of mummied bodies found 
there. Cheffrin has in it nine chambers of this kind. That door 
in Cheops is about fifty feet from the ground. From this point 
all persons ascending walk along to the left corner of the pyramid 
and climb it right at the corner, and they ascend by the same 
route. It takes three Arabs to each person that goes up — two push- 
ing up and one in front pulling — and then, in coming back, they 
reverse the order, two holding behind and one down in front. 
Before they get to the top they are so high that you can hardly 
tell a man from a woman. I did not climb to the top, principally 
because I did not have the money to spare, and partly because it 
was too hot. If I had had light clothes I believe I should have 



244 DOG FENNEL IN THE OKIENT 

tried it though I saw some strong men who seemed to have had 
a hard time climbing it. Women seemed to go up as easily as the 
men did. but one woman gave out about half way up and had to 
come back. She seemed to be overcome with fright, and the Arabs 
had to watch her very carefully to- keep her from killing herself. 
There would be very few persons who would go up there without 
guides I went a little .distance alone and found the rocks from 
long walking over that same path to be very smooth and dangerous 
and coming down was more dangerous than going up. I would 
guess from the wear on those stones that people had been climbing 
up that same path for a thousand years. A British soldier went 
up there alone a few years ago, and slipped nearly at the top. Me 
did not hit the rocks but two or three times until he got to the 
bottom, "with every bone broken/"' so they said. 

The site for those pyramids has been prepared by cutting 
away the solid stone top of the hill 200 feet high upon which they 
stand The top of this hill was so formed that in cutting it away 
two adjacent sides are left in the stone while the other two are 
cut down to the level of the desert. So much of this rock was 
removed that from the nearest points of the pyramids to these 
walls that have been left standing in the solid stone is, from my 
guess and memory, several hundred yards. The walls or faces that 
are left in the solid rock are about forty feet high, and are cut 
perpendicular and straight, and form a perfect angle where they 
meet The billions of chisel marks left on the faces of these walls 
<diow that they were all cut with the hammer and chisel, and held 
in each hand/ On the surfaces of these walls there are cut m some 
places hieroglyphic writing. The reading of this hieroglyphic 
writino- was accomplished by two men named Champolhon and 
Smith & the first a Frenchman and the latter an Englishman. How 
they came to read it seems to me nearer a miracle than anything 
any part of which I have ever personally witnessed. These gentle- 
men accomplished the reading of hieroglyphics by the Eosetta 
-tone " I saw the stone in the British Museum, m London, in 
1865 where it is set m a solid silver desk in a position to be studied. 
This'stone was found at Eosetta, in Egypt, by Napoleon. I think 
I give a full account of it in my book "Behind the Bars, 31498 
The -tone was captured from the French by the English, the 
stone seems to be agate and was originally about as nearly round 
as it would be possible to roll a snow-ball, and the stone was about 
two feet in diameter. It has been cut in half, though apparently 
almost as hard as a diamond, and the surface of the part now 
preserved in London is polished just as perfectly as the finest glass. 
On that surface, cut so as to occupy the greater part of the surface, 



dog fennel in the orient 



245 



are cut three inscriptions and even the edges of these inscriptions 
are as perfect now as the cutting on a new seal ring, and every 
character in these inscriptions is cut with wondrous accuracy, the 
lines in all cases being as nearly absolutely straight as art can 
accomplish. These inscriptions are in arrow-head, hieroglyphic 
and Greek. It was found out, in some way that I do not know, 
that these inscriptions all say the same thing, and they tell of the 
exploits of some certain Egyptian King. The comparatively easv 
reading of the Greek gave the clue to the other two inscriptions 
and from these, Egyptian hieroglyphics have been read by a few 
scholars in that science. 

_ It has seemed to me that some scientist and philanthropist at 
a time when he saw that the arrow-head writing and hieroglyphic 
writing were doomed to become obsolete by the more perfect inven- 
tion of the - Greek alphabet, prepared this stone in this manner to 
preserve the arrow-head and hieroglyphic writing. The hiero- 
glyphics cut on the faces of those rocks are about a foot high each, 
and are cut in lines of fifteen or twenty feet and are almost as 
perfect as they were when cut. In the 'faces of these stones are 
cut a number of tombs. The doors going into these, and going 
from one room to the other of these are probably seven or eight 
feet high, but the sand from the desert has so drifted into these 
that "Arkansaw" and our guide and I had to lie flat down and 
crawl through any of the doors, and the space was so small that 
I pulled off my coat and dragged it behind me. After I got back 
to Kentucky I found Sahara sand in my left vest pocket and I 
know I must have gotten it in there crawling through those doors. 
After we got inside those tombs they were abundantly high. In 
one of these the roof was fifteen feet high and one room in it was 
about twenty feet broad and thirty feet" long. Though it was cut 
out of the most solid substance it seemed to be a fancy of the 
designer to make it look frail and perishable, so that he had gone to 
great expense to cut the solid stone in the roof so as to make it look 
as if the roof had been formed by laving palm logs about fifteen 
inches in diameter, side by side across that roof. When about half 
the roof had been finished in this kind of ornamentation, that 
sculpturing in the roof had, for reason that I could not discover, 
been discontinued and the balance of the roof of that room left 
level as when first hewn out. There was enough room in that tomb 
for a good family home. I could not see why they were all neces- 
sarily tombs, but the guide said they were, and probably down in 
the bottoms of some of these sometime, when they had had the 
sand taken out, there were evidences that they were tombs. The 
sides of these tombs were polished perfectly and in them were cut 



>46 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



from the roof down to the sand, and supposably down to fbw 
floods hieroglyphics and pictures that covered the entire walls 
The light waYhardlv sufficient to see these perfectly., but they were 
all clearly cut. and the Aral, who crawled around with tts m has 
W white dress clean down to his bare feet, picked out some parts 
of tiie<e pictures and explained their meanings to us and I though, 
thev mean just what he said they did. I flunk they recorded the 
Sormanei of great rulers and military chieftains and hunters 
n as M tore does now. Cleveland and Boosevel and Emperor 
Viliam respectively shooters of ducks, bear and Jiogs doing aU 
thev can to restore the departed fame of hunters. rhere are 
through these faces of this stone in two or three places cracks iron 
op to bottom, from one to three feet wide and that were ah tost 
ertainh made by earthquakes. I could not tell whether tbo,e 
eracfa Twere there before the rock was cut. hut I would guess from 
rtie if a pearance that thev had been there for thousands of years 
^ to 10.000. ' It is from these hieroglyphic writing 
that scientists and antiquarians have gotten some part of the data 
at it the building of these pyramids How accurate these are o 
how accurately the guides report what the scientist, >at I . cannot 
tell but I think much of the conclusion ot the scientist, is acctnate 
and that thev are fairly reported by the guides. 

I noticed that occasionally the guides would dispute with each 

„„ ,„ ,™,y ™ to b-W .the PJ= .d. Ctog., a « S 

STSSit £ s."i T] th. »- ~ 

:: I vpmi- old when Cheops was built and Adam lived 19b a ears 
1 I u 1 saw and their wrappings, and sarcophagi that 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



247 



accounts did not tally with the accounts given by Moses in the 
Bible, they would point you to the place about ten miles from 
there where Moses was found in the bulrushes and tell you that 
their grandparents, some generations back, knew Moses 'and his 
family; that his origin was quite shady; that he had had to run 
off from that country to escape hanging, like Governor Taylor of 
Kentucky had done, because he (Moses) had murdered an 
Egyptian and buried him in the sand, and that Moses's Bible, 
and the Bibles of other men, were written to be read and believed 
by people who lived away off in America, or some other heathen 
and benighted country, where the people got drunk and assas- 
sinated each other and where they had no chance to know anything 
of the standing among their neighbors, of the men who ' wrote 
Bibles. These men might — I don't know that they do, for they 
do not seem to want to hurt the feelings of the believers in other 
religions — say that a strong point against the truth of the New 
Testament and in favor of the truth of the Koran is that the N. 
T. itself says that none of Jesus' own four brothers believed in him, 
while even all Christian history emphasizes the fact that the first 
sixteen followers that Mohammed had were those of his own house- 
hold living with him every day, who personally saw and knew 
him. If I were going to start out to be a great leader of the 
people, working under the direct and immediate management of 
the Lord, I would want to have my own family believing in me and 
not have one of my sons blasting me as a rascal as the son of 
"General" Booth, of the "Salvation Army," blasts his father. 

I found, crawling around in the sand near the pyramids, the 
scarabaeus, or scarab, as the Arab vendors of them call it. This 
is a variety of black beetle about an inch long with little sharp 
points sticking over its back. I picked up one of these, wrapped 
it in a piece of paper, put it in my baggage and brought it home 
and it was living for a week or so after I got home. My wife and 
I could not tell whether it died from starvation or from the colder 
climate of America. I could see nothing that it could find to eat in 
the Sahara and being the only animal life of any kind that I 
could see that lived in the desert, I suppose it is from these beetles 
that the ancient Egyptians got their idea that there was something 
supernatural about these bugs. It was cruel in me to treat the 
pour bug as I did, but I did it because I was so anxious for my 
family to see a specimen of this bug, imitations of which are sold 
by the thousands every year in Cairo, ranging all the way from 
ten cents up as high as $500, according as these imitations are 
evidently merely modern and currently made things, or have been 
pronounced by a famous and trusted expert in Cairo — to whom 



248 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



buyers there go as we would to a trusted jeweler to determine the 
genuineness of a diamond — who has pronounced the imitation of 
the scarab, made in pottery, and perhaps only a half inch long, an 
imitation of a scarab that was taken from the eyes of some mummy 
and as the case may be, one of the two scarabs that were taken 
from the two eves of some famous mummy, possibly in Pharoah's 
time, in which case they have sold for as high as $500. You who 
are familiar with our American tumble-bug know that if you touch 
him he "tends like he is dead/" and draws his legs close up to the 
side of Ms body. I saw, I suppose, several hundred of those scarabs 
and do not think that I saw any of them draw their legs up m 
that wav, but in all cases where there is nothing but the model of 
the scarab itself their legs have to be represented as being drawn 
up because it would be impractical to make and preserve these 
models with the slight legs of the insect extended. Models of these 
scarabs appear on many things connected with Egyptian burials. 
The largest that I saw was six inches long, cut elevated on a slab 
of black granite that came from a famous tomb and it was repre- 
sented with its legs extended. I suppose it would take some thou- 
sands of dollars to buy that scarab, and it will probably remain 
where it is in the wonderful Egyptian Museum of Antiquities, at 
Cairo until it is captured and carried off in some war. as the Turks 
had captured that divan that cost $20,000,000. in Constantinople, 
from the Persians, that will stand where it now is until the English 
capture it and carry it to the British Museum in London, or until 
the Russians capture it and take it to St. Petersburg, or J. Pier- 
pont Morgan captures it with dollars and brings it to New Aork. 

inother instance of the fate of such treasures is the cap- 
ture of the Rosetta stone from the Egyptians by Napoleon I. and 
its subsequent capture from him by the English, to remain m the 
British Museum until somebody will subjugate England again as 
Caesar once did, or until Macauley s "Gentleman from New 
Zealand shall sit upon the broken arch of London bridge to sketch 
the ruins of St. Paul." 

The present commercial scarab that is manufactured and sold 
by the thousands and which thousands of American Christian liars 
men and women, buy in Cairo for a quarter and bring home and. 
show to their friends as having been taken off the eyes of mum- 
mies are said in some instances to be so well executed that they 
"deceive the very elect/' The imitation scarabs that were found 
upon the eves of 'all Egyptian mummies are about a half inch long. 
They are all made flat" under the bottom so that their under sur- 
faces look like the under sides of turtles. This flat surface is 
covered with hieroglyphic characters, which, of course, are very 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIENT 



249 



small. It is said — I do not know upon what authority — that these 
characters tell about the immortality of the soul, and that these 
scarabs with these inscriptions under them are laid on the eyes 
of the dead in order that they may there read about the coming 
resurrection of the dead. If this was their meaning then certainly 
Jesus was not the author of the doctrine of the resurrection of the 
dead, and Jesus may have learned that doctrine in Egypt, where 
he might have stayed until he was nearly thirteen years old and 
may thus have introduced it to the Jews, among whom the 
Pharisees had for some time been inclined to that belief. 

These inscriptions on the eyes of the mummies were too close 
for reading conveniently, but I have told you that many Orientals 
are near-sighted, and it may have been that it was as fashionable 
to be near-sighted in those old days as it is now : and the places in 
which they had to be read were very dark. It seems to me that 
those old fellows who have been lying there over 5,000 years read- 
ing those inscriptions would get awful tired waiting for the resur- 
rection, and that, in some instances, an individual one might get to 
be very much discouraged by the thought that the resurrection had 
possibly come and that everybody else excepting him or her had 
been resurrected, while he or she may have been, by some accident, 
overlooked or failed to awake on the morning of the resurrection 
when the angelic hall steward tapped on his sleeping room door. 
It seems to me that a man lying flat on his back for over 5,000 
years, and reading those inscriptions on his eyes, would be liable 
to get, anyhow, into an unpleasant perplexity as to whether he 
was dead or alive, or having the nightmare or drunk. I should 
think that he would reason that the very fact that he was reading 
was an evidence that he was not very dead, but a pretty live corpse, 
to be able to read at all under these circumstances, and that noticing 
that each thousand years be was drying up more and more and 
getting back to the dust out of which he had heard that Adam was 
made, he would feel some anxiety as to how he was going to pull 
himself together on the morning of the resurrection, and that 
when those who had been buried before Xoah's flood found the 
water coming in upon them and making mud out of their dust, 
they must have gotten awfully mixed in their judgments about the 
meaning of the scripture, "dust to dust/ 7 that they heard the 
preacher say at their funerals. 

In two or three hundred yards of Cheops are some very ancient 
temples that are now in ruins, but the black granite masonrv of 
some of them still stands, six or eight feet high in the walls. They 
are ^erv large, but are built with wonderful permanency. The 
stones in them are perfect and they have probably been destroyed 



250 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



to do other building with. The guides said they were built 3500 
B C Ul of the other pyramids there are small and unimportant 
Is compared with the two that I have described The pyramids 
fifteen miles away can be clearly seen from the base of Cheops, 
and none of them is so interesting as Cheops and theftrm. 

The question as to how the pyramids were built and whence 
they got the stone is one of great interest to all. I think it probable 
that at the time they were built the Nile ran right along at the 
base of the bluff upon which the pyramids now stand. 1 he Nile is 
now emit miles from them, hut in that alluvial soil, all of which 
evidentlv been deposited there by the Nile, as it is all the time 
hit deposited now in the Delta, at Alexandria the Nile would 
naturalh shift its position and has almost certainly, at some time, 
n i I t at the base of the bluff upon winch the pyramids stand 
tl e%tone then could not have been floated upon boats rto the 
bLe of the bluff on which the pyramids are. it would have been w 
easv matter to cut a canal from the river to the point, or points, 
ahwbich they wanted to land the stone. Where they gut tins stone 
e lie one of the mysteries. Fifteen miles up the river from 
Cheop— which is on the Plain of Gizeb and they are. therefore 
sometimes called the pyramids of Gi f h-there is a mountem which 
has been hollowed out showing that a large amount of stone has 
een taken from it. hut engineers think that but a small part of 
t te s tote used in the eighteen pyramid, could have been gotten 
here and that the great' part of the stone used in building he 
pvramids came from a place 300 miles up the Nile an w as floated 
down The ordinary variety of palm trees is very light and easi y 
ami would make the cheapest kind of rafts and then possibly 
ii el f r fuel or other purposes at Cairo, in which climate wood 
tots immensely longer than m America, or th is stone i nay have 
been brought down in boats and the boats take n hac -h b y sa 
arc thousands of boats sailing up that river t oday ite tow ban ks 
and the low country around it making it favorable foi sailing, the 
me being landed' there, it was simply a matter of physical force 
of en mcamels. or donkeys, to take those stone from where the 
were £nld np the hill to 'the level of the desert and then on up 

TZfof Egypt that is about 150 miles long and 300 miles 
broad C all been deposited there by what has wash* down the 
Vile. Estimating the rate of deposit at Alexandria as It ^seems 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



251 



by seven feet, and there were some monolithic columns that are 
four by four by fifteen feet. 

I believe that about the Sphinx I gained some ideas that are 
correct and which I have never heard suggested by any other writer 
or lecturer upon the subject. My idea is that the Sphinx is cer- 
tainly a combination of nature and art. The idea of the Sphinx 
is found almost everywhere in the most ancient Egyptian archi- 
tecture, especially among their temples. Whether the Egyptian 
idea of the Sphinx originated from the singular natural formation 
there on the Plain of G-izeh, a half mile from Cheops, or whether 
that idea was already extant in Egypt when this formation was 
found that resembled the idea I do not know, but I incline to think 
that the idea was extant in Egypt when this natural Sphinx was 
discovered and the resemblance still increased by artificial means. 
How this idea got into the world is on the same plan that the 
Egyptian idea of a winged lion got into the world, and the Roman 
idea of the winged horse, Pegasus, and the English idea of the 
winged dragon that St. George killed, and the Christian idea of 
the winged men, called angels, when they have feathers in their 
wings, or the devil, or devils, when they have wings like bats — all 
alike from the distorted imaginations of men — the men embracing 
women — or from the mere poetic fancies of men. The body of 
the Sphinx is almost like it was originally found, but in a few 
places the people cut the stones into such shapes as being 
fastened onto the body, in masonry cemented firmly together and 
to the body of the lion, have made the shape of the lion a more 
apt resemblance than it was by nature. That stone that has been 
cemented onto the body of the lion is almost as firm and solid as 
the original stone except in some instances in which it has been 
wedged off by persons who, I imagine, thought that masonry might 
close up a door that went into the body of the lion. The head and 
neck of the woman on the lion's body were, by nature, very much 
more like the head and neck of a woman than Meredith's round 
ball of dirt was like the head and neck of "Mrs. Lot." The neck 
is naturally the right length and the head naturally the right size, 
with the right poise of her head on her neck for a woman who felt 
that she was being looked at and was liable, at any moment, to 
have a snap-shot picture of her taken that would go into some book. 
There is one striking feminine peculiarity about that Sphinx 
woman- — she never tells anybody how old she is. I have been a 
census taker twice and I would not even ask her, even if she were 
not an Arab, or Egyptian, or some kind of foreigner. 

But there is another peculiarity about her that is not so much 
like other women — she never repeats anything that is said in her 



252 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



presence. I am a shorthand writer, and if I could get that woman 
to talking the Kentucky language and let her tell ahout some of 
the things that have happened there right before her eyes I could 
get up abetter hook than this one. Men, all the way from Sesos- 
tris down to Napoleon, have stood and looked that woman in the 
face and she never blushed— she didn't have to : her face is painted 
red. She is a hard-faced, stony-hearted, hard-headed woman: hut 
she has got staving qualities and when she puts her foot down it 
stays there for five or six thousand years and she stands pat on 
the same position and the same views of things that she originally 
took. " Cleopatra has looked at that woman many a time, hut no 
passion burned the heart of the Sphinx woman as in the heart 
of that famous Egyptian queen, whose wiles ruined Anthony. The 
Queen of Sheba probably saw that Sphinx woman and told Solo- 
mon ahout her. hut she was one woman that Solomon could not 
beguile. Moses looked at that woman, and it is quite possible that 
Jesus Christ looked at that woman, but her stony eyes shed no tears 
to wash his feet and the granite tresses of her hair did not fall in 
soft luxuriance to wipe them, as when Mary Magdaline looked upon 
the handsome young Nazarene carpenter. 

The woman's face that men cut on that natural suggestion of 
a head and face has in it the character that is appropriate for 
=mch a woman. The whole face was. at the time of its making, 
perhaps, and certainly at some time that nobody now knows ot. 
uainted red, and the paint is there to such a degree to this day that 
any eood e ves can see that it has been painted. Whether this was 
done to preserve it or because it was fashionable for the ladies ot 
her dav^to paint their faces. I do not think anybody will ever 
know but my impression was that it was because that was a feature 
of female beauty, because I saw no other instance of anything m 
.tone being painted to preserve it. The nose has nearly all gone 
but whether it was broken of! or has disintegrated from tmie I 
could not tell. It is quite difficult to get to her nose— impossible, 
in fact, without a long ladder. The legs of the lion part of the 
woman that are stretched out in front of her are fifty-two feet 
W and there is room enough for a camel and a man to stand 
on one of the claws of her paw. I could only see one leg-of the 
lion, mind yon— and only the top of that, and that part was 
artificially made. That one was almost covered m the sand and 
the other- one was entirely so. To the top of the woman s head 
from the sand that came up to the nether side ot the lion is forty- 
five feet The face is about fifteen feet long— long-faced but not 
hypocritical-and twelve feet broad, but the face and hair that 
sticks out each side, like that of the Egyptian fashion, probabh 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



253 



when she was a young lady and first went into society, are almost 
hirty feet broad. From the top of the front legs down to the oof 
torn of the body of the lion-and that part of the whale tha Jonah 
got into and not to be mentioned in connection with a lady-is 
en feet but all that part was filled up with sand. There are about 
wenty feet from the paws of the lion, thirteen steps that go down 
to the stone upon winch the lion is crouched, but only a part of 
he top step showed above the sand. That step seemed to have 
been made at the tame the Sphinx was put into shape. The body 
°L \y °? 18 f™\ m y feet lo^. The sand was about six feet 
from the top of i s back so that I easily got up on the back. The 
resemblance, which was all natural, to the crouching haunches of a 
V 7 Stnl ™g r d the stone had almost exactly the tawny 
yellow of a lion. The back of the woman's head has not been cut 
to represent hair but it has been symmetrically rounded bv chise 
and hammer. The sand for about fifty feet square in front of the 
Sphinx was, when we were there taken away down to a depth of 
about twelve feet deep. The filling up or digging out of this space 

of the 1 Snbto 6 g l 6at di ! erenc :, in the W~ of pictures Sen 
in ttt SOme lmes * hese P ie t"es are taken from down 

in that space and sometimes from the level of the sand of the 
desert outside, so that sometimes the sand appears in the pictures 

ront It T ° ^ 01 the SphinX ^Lnetimes the who e 
front of the body can be seen. If in any modern day anybody has 
ever cleared away the sand from around the Sphinx thuf all o 
it could be seen, I know of no evfdence of it. Eight in front of 
the Sphinx on a granite slab probably two feet thick and ten feet 
long horizontally, and extending down into the sand how far I 
did not know, is carved the familiar Egyptian emblem of a sphere 
with wings to it. An Arab guide gave me his version the 
meaning of the emblem. I do not know whether he was right but 
I thmk it alluded to the worship of the sun. If the Egyptian dto 
not worship the sun they worshiped pretty much everything under 



While that old Arab was sitting there looking at me and 
giving an occasional bit of information he looked at me with a 
halt smile and said in very plain English: 



"Jack and Jill went up a hill, to get a pail of water. 
It had no relevancy whatever to anything we were saying 



™ ™ a^jLiuxig we were saying or 
doing, and seemed to be intended to surprise me with his 
familiarity with a piece of English that he thought I would not 
expect him to know. He certainly succeeded, if that was his graft 
tor the remark as coming from him was only second in point of 



354 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

surpise to me to some flippant suggestion that might have Mien 
from the lips of the Sphinx, some fatty teet-that is the lips 

above me. . , ' . . T n-i 

If there was any rock in the whole of the Orient that I would 
hare kissed like those people around Jerusalem kissed rocks my 
SanS , and a habit I contracted in my young man ^tafpre 
I got to be a Puritan preacher-would hare have made me kiss 
the S! Mnx woman right in the mouth. It would hare been a 
nnrely Platonic kiss-I would have kissed her for her mother. 
AU this —Ling that I had some way to get up to her mouth. 
When I tad gone a short distance on my way from the Sphinx 
Wl up the to the Cheops. I came to an Arab standing by his 
camel hat was kneeling on the sand and for an equivalent of ten 
nS in our money, tlte Arab gladly agreed to let me , ride up to 
the pyramid, about a quarter oi a mile away I go onto 
queer pack, or saddle, without any trouble and the Arab told me 
to lean back I did so and soon saw the reason lor it. The camel 
-e fii-t on his hind legs and the tendency is to throw you over 
Stof I roue on up to the pyramid. If Ihad £ M betw-n 
walking across the Sahara and tiding a camel across it, I snoum 
ride the camel, hut when a man stars out to ride a camel pure 
f a iimtter of pleasure. I think the joke is on the mam I am 
writing this liook having for one purpose of it. at least, to impart 
nfo mation about men and women and things that I saw on Aa 

^•g^ue^ 

or ass^n L to ^ them, but neither he nor his wafe ever 
thought it 'worth while to indicate to me. m ay way, tl t ^they 

SteffiSl d ot a re H at h ali "hat I believe about it and I think 
path} tor me i mad at me and had said 

hive shown by some word or action, not necessarily a formal 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT m 

Sweeny and all the prieste o'That f 3 th ° U?and me n ^e 

and yet there is a X pLe in „ v htw^S * f ° r S ood c onnt; 
Harrison. I feel sorry for anv nun, 1 ° r f""*^" and none 
Sweeny is, but while I sy^S ^ " dUP<i ° f P riestoa ft as 
religion because it was tteffi^ 2T Wh ° loves ^ 

who have their religion for revS only^ ^ 1 ^ m » 

* eCttrS She £J ? 3 ^ ^ 

flags stretched between tal pain trees wl' ' '7 - 8Teat American 
throwing of confetti w» - I 1 tre f, were a fairy scene. The 

of the evening. Jtfy ™ ^fiT* ^ m the ™nent 
quite complimented when sT™ ? f ^ f °v S ? me time ' bllt 1 felt 
long haired beard with Tt ™d St ^ T** ^ m ? 
over their temerity. scampered away hilarious 

is 6 5 o n yHr 01 r ^sssjtsrs of Suitan H — » 

finest in Cairo There Ca^ HaSSan ls the lar £est and 

there are some cS^efiTSaS b^ll 3 1 
to have seen anv or heard of am w I , ot rem ember 
Mohammed Alt Lha built Lllee III Tfy ^ m ° SqUe of 
is a fine view of the citv and fhl , alabaster. From it 

around it many ^^J^TT^^ ^ 11 bas 
fi- feet long, 'in a court bv tne^de ft 'n ISttl 
of a ruse all of the last of the ul i i ' H ' b - v some kmcl 
of them were murdered exec t one , "1 aSSembled and al] 
off a precipice tlmrfa l uXd f "t In'h h ° rSe to J um P 

safely to the bottom Man v Xl! 8 ' nder «' 01n ? witb «™ 
of the man making his C^^w^V^/™ 8 ° D that sto ^ 
Pice. In Borne MariusTnTv v, P h ™ down a g reat preci- 
erack in the Tarpe an" o mlkeT d ° WQ into a g re at 

says it did close^ncf we Ta ^he 7% ^ and tbe rec ^ d 

crack that we could self w?ti a m n and T *f **** ™ no 
it must have closed as the ton savTit did h ?™?°™ in and 
stories some poor but fl rrW fv V In A ™bian Nights" 
castle of * B %M i a t^^ h £^ i h '7 rfdes "P t0 
daughter, who slides down I m > beautiful aiwl only 

her before him upon tne sLuldeS of 7^^° ^ 3mS and sets 
man coming with a bull dT ™? , 1 ^ but seein §' tbe old 
only time to escape bj^^tT'^ ^ W bas 
lour hundred fee hi/h ™Hf. ■ + • ° ff 3 P recl Pice three or 
as, in mid-air. he looks b^k 7 f I" Cau §' bt a ^ap-shot 
at the old man. After 1 \ ° ^ itlXT hat 

orbe and llls tw o riders proceed 



556 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



on their way to the plant below and the fire flashes from the hoofs 

or the hoiS as they strike the flints as they gallop on and the 
ot the hor.e . a. m t0 the ymmg 

'St^eta 1 old tnan stating that he had hnng him- 
l fid I d b eioK writing the note and that the young man and has 
bride wotfld "please hurry back and firing along a cradle and a 

^ £££ S S£ SK*S^ histories 

and lamps and rugs and a mg and 3 e L e t ^ g]i 

bewildering splendor, where we all wa 11 exhausted 
amazed at in ^ -^^^XirSon and amaze- 
over and ^over agam aU oi om M ^ ^ 

ment and looked < t the t hmgs ^ ^ ere 

" ."it ^ more - and I saw so many of these gorgeous mosques 
to say it an} mote , an i t gorgeous fairy scene., as 

PktSlC^TA^^V ^d Proven true and I had 

witne^ed it? wonderful revelations. 

Itiilillill 

the top of it screwed ofl f°' W and could fie all 

ctrppts tins in old Lairo — out ui ^ai. - 

their shoulders, and it was astonishing how well they dad «. Yes, 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 2S7 

I forgot; I saw a Christian church of tV,„ n >-■ 
very old and dilapidated and verv Lt w ° P Seei n wa * 
old Christian hearts because it was & l * , W3S dear to their 
and Mary and Jesus ha d sta ye b£ VpT * pkce J here J "«eph 
from Herod. The old church dM Zi 7 ^V* flee 4 
as a place of worship foTZvt-L^T^ H W been used 
holy family seem to have S the S 'f ° f >' eaK - T ^ 

ground. We went to Tsteirwav of , f?™ 8 mto holes in the 
slanted down through tL payment into^ ^ ste P s tbat 
hole was a room or several lo^ZtilhL n^ bel ° W ' The 

amount to twenty-five or t~'Ct .ZrTf l^^ W ° uM 
several apartments. The whole hole had tit nk there were 

very ancient. The guides told m tw + v a PPe«ance of being 
Joseph and Mary and Jesus stl ed wl ^ W3S the P lace *'here 
tub similar to that one ha I to d 1 I 7 7lt in E ^ t A 
star," and out of which the "wise ™ » T f* the wel1 of the 
Bethlehem, was in this sutemTeL W ^ ■ <a their ^ to 
stone of about two feet cube had ,L " ^ ' A block of 
tub cut in it that would hold abou t tl T CaVe bottomed 

nest part of the edges about three inches fhl 

this was the tub in which Marv hey told us that 

tub appeared to be very anctenCd It fl ^ f JeSUS - This 
peared to have been made Tor ' use ann £ I wMe bouse a P" 

eourse, quite possible that this place mavTave^ ™^ H is ' ° f 
the stone just as a relia-ious Lnd l 4? 7 ^ been du S out of 
Church of Nativity in Ci a t0 ^ b £ Jesus « the 

nativity of Jesus at BrtSSSkJ^^T the T St , able " of 
possible that this alleged home^of T. Z T< K hardh >' see *s 
Cairo, could have been madeTinee theZfi " ^ ^ JefraB ' in 
of that country, for althou e h the ° h ™ dans S ot possession 
have been generous tolfie Chris W ItT^T ^ ^ to 
ancient time since the MokZl ' n0t Seem that in ™v 

have been enough Titoari^JT*^ ^ there TOuId 
fraud. As to whether Lrefore ? t ^ to Pirate such a 
existence of the ft milV W ' 8 ^ SOme f °undation for the 
family," thJ , sta£ ^ aTlS*^ ^"^^^ as ^oly 
tion of interest to those who w I ? ^ ° ne; is a 
affected by the place in the old cZ, ? ^ inf ° med and as 
one of the gospel writers mi^t S ^ 
it seems, very stupid to suppose that TtZ i , Egy P t ' anc! 

Jesus would' take his throne an st™ ^ feared that 



258 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE OEIENT 



lived in the Fourth Century, A. 1).. and was murdered by St. Cyril. 
Christian Bishop of Alexandria, because of her most effective oppo- 
sition to the Christian religion, and such a man as Cyril was, 
would, of course, not hesitate at the perpetration of any kind of 
a fraud to sustain his religion from which he gained wealth and 
power and honor. It is quite possible, then, that such a Christian 
spirit a- once prevailed at Alexandria would have been equal to the 
task of perpetrating the fraud of making the house of the holy 
family under the Coptic Church in Cairo, the two cities being 
in constant communication, and the Christians of that day may 
have done this to supplement the influence of the Christian religion 
in Jerusalem by making this under-ground home for the holy 
family in Cairo, to sustain the story of the flight into Egypt. A 
strong suspicion of imposture about the Coptic Church home of the 
holy family is in the fact that it is made to resemble that where 
Jesus is -aid to have been born in Bethlehem, when it is a tact that 
living in these houses cut out of the rock as they have long done 
in Pale-tine does seem to have been a custom of the people of 
Egypt On the other hand the houses of the masses ot the people 
in Egypt where rock is scarce, except in the desert where nobody 
woulcT or could, live, seem to have been made of very frail material 
because their climate was favorable to that, and so their houses 
were made of adobes and straw and reeds plastered over with the 
product of the camel. The Christians knew that one ot these 
perishable house, could not be preserved in connection with the 
history of Jesus, so it seems that they may have found this place m 
Cairo' close to the desert and chiseled this permanent alleged home 
of the holy family out of the rock. Then, again, it is quite pos- 
sible that 'there were such persons as this holy family who came 
from Palestine to Egypt, and that after the Christian religion 
came into power, in the Fourth Century, by the conversion of Con- 
tantine. this home of the holy family in Cairo may have been 
constructed simply as a fraud, or it may have been there so that the 
holy family actually lived in it. It rather seems to me that the 
stories of the presence of Jesus in Egypt go to indicate that there 
was some such person as Jesus and that upon his becoming the 
rider of a religious sect the marvelous stories about him were 
added either by his own influence or that of his friends or a com- 
b nat on of the two. as has been true of various religious leaders m 
" daw The followers of my grandfather Barton W. Stone, the 
Wilder of the present Christian, or CampbeUite, church, almost 
forced miracles into his history, though he never encouraged an } - 
thing of the kind, and the progeny of those people are now among 
the finest society of Kentucky. In my own limited abilities as an 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 259 

Kentucky \ ZLff^ ? ^ the «"«»"»»» °* 

jyentiick}, I thought at the time, and still think that I saw it 

perfectly pebble, with just a little connivance a fraud on mv 

part ol mj purpose, and the people saw that and thev had nm *r 
seen tt m any other preacher, and the step from wherfl was wilh 

called personal magnetism, that Kentucky ha^ produced in such 

com: SSrs^tas 5 

C ^:u%r^»^: 

as you go out from Cairo are nnt^iten Sesiden e f a lf new ™d 
many m process of construction. Thev are built of veiw' t 
or marble with much stucco work ^ont ^e^tfj^Z^Z 
that Cairo is a rapidly growing city Wh™ thl +1 mclle 1 atm S 
square miles are recovered" fronAhe deser ' S b wtr i 
about done now, Cairo and Alexandria will be grea port fo r shin 

^S^^XdW 0ne ai 7fl° ne ?ft 
The one standing at Heliopolis now is in a DY wl a+a'f* « 

the ton / ' th ^. s i P.fg to ^otit four feet square a few feet from 
the top from which it slopes to a nmn+ T1-T i ■ f / 



260 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



were taken away had. for a long time, lain upon the ground. The 
work on the obelisk now standing there indicates that it was origi- 
nally built so that the entire shaft was above the ground fcmce 
it was built the Nile has deposited all over that country, about ten 
feet of soil, and that soil had, of course, covered about ten feet ot 
the base of that obelisk. The soil has been removed down to the 
foundation of the obelisk that was originally on the surface ot the 
ground, and a fine stone wall has been built all around it, leaving 
a passaie of twelve or fifteen feet all around the obelisk, and, down 
to the bottom of the space thus enclosed, there goes a nice stairway, 
though the gate at the top is kept locked. There is no occasion for 
loml down there, as it can be perfectly seen without that, and the 
wall and the iron fence on top keep the relic vandal from doing 
it with his little hatchet. \ 

Th-re is no sign of any other antiquity near it. All ot the 
houses abound it are modern, many of them new. It _ seems ^ hardly 
possible, though, that those four wonderful monoliths could ha.e 
stood there with no city around them, and I suppose that down 
under the ground around there, there are the remains of some city 
L has been buried by the deposits of the Nile The effect of 
on liness and solitude produced by that obelisk standing there is 
certainly verv impressive. How long it has stood there nobody 
knows, but its record in hieroglyphics shows that it -as put there 
before any writing by an alphabet was known to the world. From 
ti e Bible account, Moses, who lived in that country was wrtog 
the Hebrew language 3,476 years ago. That obelisk has almost 
eerWy stood there for over 4,000 years-possibly twice that long 
and is good for several thousand years more if it is not destroyed 
in war or by some freak like Herostratus who burned the temple 
of Diana at Ephesus. 

There is no telling what men will do. M. D. Atwater was in 
our partv. He formerly represented the United States government 
at Tahita. and married a princess there. You could not call her a 
black woman, and yet she was not a white woman, but she was a 
verv lovely lady, and her husband and she, a devoted couple were 
exceedingly attractive people. And yet Mr. Atwater said that if he 
had Ms wav with the pyramids he would put dynamite m them and 
blow them up. I do not believe he would do it, and it would take 
a lot of dvnamite to seriously damage Cheops; but such a speech 
a^ that from a man of the standing of Mr. Atwater might suggest 
to some fool like Herostratus to blow up the pyramids to make 
himself famous, as the assassins of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley 
did to make themselves famous, and as I felt disposed to make 
myself famous, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, m Jerusalem, 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 261 

to rush up behind the Patriarch of Jerusalem catch up the skirt 
of h* robe laden with jewels and gold when, for a moment, my 

obLf % Tt ^ might have made the Mohammedan 
soldiers thmk I was a religious devotee who simply wanted the 
honor of lifting that robe, while with my thick-soled^ shoes, I would 
have given that old devil a kick under that robe that would have 
immortalized me and made a million of people read this book, 
While I would hare come nearer doing like Jesus Christ when he 
kicked that gang out of the temple than any other man who has 

I n, <. had done {t and had taken W ^nees. I know 

the Christians would have killed me right there, if the Mohamme- 
dan had let them do it, but I know that five minutes talk with 
a Mohammedan, who understood the Kentucky language would 
have saved me from the Christians, but I suppose it would have 
been impossible for me to have gotten through the line of Moham- 
medan soldiers who stood there to keep other Christians from kill- 
mg mat old rascal. 

Three or four miles from Heliopolis is the tree, still standing- 
there, under which Joseph and Mary and Jesus staid when they 
first came to Egypt, and a spring that the Lord made for Mary 

j°u, m L ° rd t0 gh ' e her SOme water t0 wash 

This tree seemed to be dead. It has a high stone wall around 
it, enclosing about the eighth of an acre, and a good broad and high 
gate that does not make you bow as you come in, and there was no- 
body there to make you back out, crawfish fashion like they make 
you do at Jerusalem. I never had been in a habit of backing out 
of anything that I went into, but they made me do it at Jerusalem. 
It 1 had had as much money as some of those Cookies had, I would 
have seen those fellows at the devil before I would have backed 
out of any of their shows. I would have tested it in the Moham- 
medan courts if necessary, but poverty and independence are like 
oil and water— they won't mix. 

nf ■ i That i fi tr f , WM sometllin ? thf >* looked like a combination 
ol a big old Kentucky sycamore tree and an olive tree, with a little 

tt °f m i lt U l00k6d Kke a Ver y old tree - I* ™» about 

Darts e al /f ' T^^T Up t*™ tlle S round in *™> about equal 
parts, each three feet m diameter. One part stood straight and the 
other part leaned so much that I saw a man walking up its trunk 
and so many people had done that and cut their names on it, and 
donefor ? ° S0Uvenirs of il that <&> old tree was about 

If you just listen to the guide he will tell you that that is the 
tree under which Joseph and Mary and Jesus stopped, and I think 



262 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



OTobablY onlv spent the night, when they were in Egypt and you 
ruSe-W from the glide that that is the identmal tree ^and 
that Joseph probably hung Ms long white dress on that leaning 
part of the tree when he took it off and put on his pajamas that 
L got out of his grip, and went to bed by lying down on the 
ground and putting his head on one of those roots possAly whist- 
ling in a jocular mood, to cheer his wife, a bar or two from Boot 
oo* or die." Beside the day wear of Joseph probably hung those 
of Mary and little Jesus when the two had put on their nighties, 
and the little fellow had said, "Now I lay me," ending with Ami 
This I ask for Jesus' sake," or possibly had said, without making 
a mistake, "Our father who art in heaven." But if you show 
some disposition to quibble about that particular tree being . about 
1903 rears old that guide will so compromise his original statement 
to you. as to suggest that some authorities about that tree 1 aye 
suggested that as soon as one dies there, at a very old age, another 
immediately appears in its place. I think that before many years, 
the same angel that carried those steps from Jerusalem to Borne, 
one night, will, some night, plant another tree where that mori- 
bund one now is. Everybody else went out of there and left me 
d an old harper in there. He possibly took me for some , kmd 
of a nondescript Frenchman, for he plunked the Marse lies Hymn 
on that harp. Considering his instrument he did it fairh yell, 
barring two or three bars that seemed to be an Egyptam version 
that would not go in Paris. That old harp had a case of curved 
pine that was pitiful. If David did not take his harp to heaven 
with him to give the angels a few pointers on plunking harps. 1 
Zk that muft have been Davy's old harp that that oM I Mb™ had 
bought in a junk shop in Jerusalem, for I never say Davj s harp 
on exhibition either in Jerusalem or Borne. 

• About fifty yards from the gate of the wall around that tree 
there is what is called Mary's spring. In the morning after sleeping 
under that tree through the night, Mary wanted -me water to w sh 
Jesus and asked the Lord to give her some, and that spring 
Wed out of the ground" is what the guide said th ough « a 
matter of fact, it is not a spring, and does not hist out ot the 
oroimcl but is a walled well and the water is now being pumped 
up oi irrigating purposes, by the same kind of blindfolded black 
buffalo cow that i turning two wheels with a line of buckets over 
then These cows are ke|t blindfolded, so they cannot ell when 
to stop walking fast by noticing that nobody is watching hem. 

As an evidence that this spring was miraculously made the 
guides sav it is true that there is no other water like that in all 
l"yp I looked at the water, washed my hands m it and drank 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 263 

some of it, and found it just like all the water I found everywhere 
else m Egypt, and that well is exactly like thousands of wells that 
are found all over the part of Egypt that the Nile inundates, and 
just such water as is found there anywhere they want it by oWing 
ten or twelve feet. It is very clear and soft, but not so cool as our 
Kentucky springs. 

M 1 Sa Z tlie .P ]ac( ; wher e they say Pharoah's daughter found 
Moses There is not a single bulrush near it now, though there 
may have been some there when Moses was found there Thev 
ought to plant some there and build an iron picket fence around 
them and say they are exactly the same bulrushes that Moses was 
round m. The place is now in Cairo, but in the opposite side of 
the river from the main part of Cairo. That place is the origin of 
the modern baby farm/' It would be an appropriate place for a 
foundling hospital Moses and the greatest of all presidents of the 
United States hadn't any particular pa that anybody knew about 

the Nilometer is one of the curiosities of Cairo. It is close 
to the place where Moses was found. It is simply a pillar with 
figures on it— Arabic figures of course— in the middle of a deep 
cistern or poo connected with the Nile by stone pipes so that the 
water shows the depth of the Nile by the figures on that pillar, 
the same thing now has been so much more conveniently accom- 
plished by simply putting a scale, that can be seen at a loner dis- 
tance on a prominent wall that stands on the edge of the Vile 
that the historic old Nilometer seems to have fallen into disuse and 
is only visited as an antiquity. 

There is a large building in connection with it, and much 
tine mosaic pavement around it. 

A remarkable thing about Arabs is that they have slashes cut 
m their faces on the sides of their eyes and in their foreheads that 
tell something about the family to which they belong. These 
slashes are about an inch and a half long, and are made in infancy 
by their mothers. They are cut with razors and must be quite deep 
I did not notice it on any young children and think the custom is 
probably becoming obsolete. 

I saw a banyan tree that was 120 feet spread. The ladies wear 
their bracelets on their ankles. They are nice bracelets; I looked 
at a lot of them. "That reminds me," as Lincoln used to say. One 
day some of the Cookie ladies and gentlemen were riding donkeys 
on the desert. The women all rode man-fashion. One lady got her 
dress so pulled up on her ankles (?) that some gentleman had to 
assist her and Rev. Marshall, aged 66, was voted the right man 
to do it. I happened not to be there. Rev. Marshall, in telling me 
afterward of his embarrassment, said: "Some people seem to think 



261 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIENT 



a preacher lias no feeling.'' I have been a preacher, and have, 
sometimes in my life, been called upon in such emergencies as that. 
I have always been willing to sacrifice myself. 

The Dancing Dervishes are one of the curiosities of Cairo. 
From David, who "danced before the Lord/' clean down to the 
Shakers in Kentucky, there have been people who thought the 
Lord enjoyed seeing "people "tip the light fantastic toe," in such 
varying versions of "Highland fling-'- and "pigeon wing" as nnto 
the" pious seemed good. One Friday, the Mohammedan Sabbath, 
a hundred or two Cookies went to see these strange Mohammedan 
dancers. The place we saw them in Cairo is the most famous in 
the world for that peculiar worship. Cook furnishes the carriages 
and guides for the place, all "nominated in the bond" before you 
startr The church where this dancing is done is in the old part 
of Cairo. It is almost like going through the Labyrinth where 
Perseus found Andromeda to get it. We went up steps and down 
steps and around corners and through alleys and under arches and 
all sorts of unreasonable highways and byways to get to it. The 
old church has a general dilapidated and blase appearance that 
indicates that that particular brand of Mohammedanism that wor- 
ships there is dying out. 

The room into which we went was about fifty feet square. 
In the middle of this was a smooth circular floor about 
thirty feet in diameter, around which was a plain wooden 
railing about three feet high. There was not a seat in the whole 
house .except on the floor. We were not required to pull off our 
shoes or to put on any slippers. All Mohammedans wore their 
fezes, and all other men took off their hats simply at their own 
suggestion. About -fifteen feet above the ground floor was another 
floor with a circular opening through it the same size as the circle 
below, with a railing around it. and so arranged as easily to see 
the floor below. All Mohammedans went up the steps to that 
room above and all others, equally men and* women, filled the space 
below, nearly all being able to see well over the railing. 

The Mohammedan audience upstairs was not more than forty. 
There was not a Mohammedan woman in the house. Down in our 
part of the house there were about 200 people, all mere spectators. 
When we had waited about a half hour, three old men came in and 
went up stairs to a little place partitioned off for them. They all 
sat down on the floor. One had a book and. sticking it almost up 
until it touched the end of his nose, read from it in a noise that 
sounded like a combination of singing, crying and a Catholic- 
priest. One man took up some kind of a weird instrument and, 
blowing into one end of it. made a strange and discordant noise. 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



265 



There seemed to be some kind of a tune to it, but it was different 
from anything I had ever heard. It was more like our Southern 
negro songs than anything else, but lacked the melody of the ne-ro 
song A man sat facing him who had a queer kind of a drum upon 
which he beat with one stick. The man who beat the drum beat 
it to beat the band, but seemed to make no effort to keep time with 
the man who was blowing the instrument. Then fifteen old men 
came m and took their positions near the gate that came into the 
circular floor below. All of them took off their slippers and left 
them outside the ring, leaving them bare-footed, and all kept on 
their fezes. Thirteen of them had on long white skirts like womens' 
dresses, made very full and of light material. Two of them who 
were priests had the same dress with a broad badge hung around 
their necks like Episcopal preachers. One old man then walked 
out into the circle and, standing fronting the audience, turned his 
right foot m pigeon-toed style and then, fixing his left foot in the 
same pigeon-toed style, he carefully crossesd his left bio- toe oyer 
his right big toe and stood for a half minute carefully and appar- 
ently prayerfully, contemplating the effect, then walked to the 
railing and took a position facing the center of the circular floor 
A second old man came in and reverentially crossed his toe* con- 
templated the effect, just as his predecessor had done, and took his 
stand beside the first one. and so on until the whole thirteen had 
done this, the whole occupying a quarter of an hour. I have not 
for years witnessed any religious ceremony that so deeply impressed 
me and for which I had so much respect. Then one old man 
walked out into the ring and stretched his arms straight out at 
right angles with his body, both hands being open and" the palm 
of the left hand turned up and the right one turned down. I was 
told that the left hand was receiving good gifts from heaven and 
that the right one was pouring them out upon the earth I did 
not see anything pass either way. Then the old man commenced 
turning, and m a half minute, he was going so fast that his skirts 
stood straight out and had much the motion of one of our American 
vaudeville skirt dancing women, the vaudeville woman however 
as a general thing, having the advantage of the old man m the 
matter of underpinning. I enjoyed seeing that one days perform- 
ance of the dervishes more than I would any one performance of 
a vaudeville, but as a regular, everyday performance I would rather 
see the vaudeville. It developed, fortunately, that all of those old 
men had on pantalets. I would not have staved if they had not 
had them. I remembered the Dead Sea. The old fellows spun like 
a top : that is, while rapidly spinning around they also made curves 
around the circle. Every half minute a new man would step in 



266 



DOG FENNEL IX THE OEIEXT 



and they would so arrange it that sometimes all would be whirling 
at once' and sometimes about half of them. Their toes would be 
close together and it was quite astonishing to see how fast the toes 
of those old codgers chased themselves in getting around. Each 
fellow before lie would start out thus into life's busy whirl would 
kneel on the floor and butt his forehead on the floor, like he was 
trying to drive down any loose nails in the floor that might other- 
wise snag his feet, or he was trying to jolt his brain somehow so 
as to enable him to get along without addling his brain in the 
whirl. In the mean "time the two priests were making remarks 
to Allah and to Mohammed, looking up toward the sky where they 
were, calling their attention to the excellence of the dance and 
the music, for the musicians never let up. Then these priests 
would get down on their knees and acted like they had these 
magnetized tack-hammers strapped on their foreheads and were 
tacking down oil cloth preparatory to putting up the winter stove. 
Then when the priests had bumped their heads around on the 
floor a while they would get up and walk around the old fellows 
whirling, and an "interesting part of the performance was to notice 
that the ' old waltzers with "their arms stretched out never hit the 
priest or hit each other, and the priests seemed to be walking in 
amono- them simply to show this strange fact. 

T told old "Arkansaw" to time them and he said they spun 
from four to six minutes each, then an old fellow would waltz out 
to the railing, drop down on his knees, drive down a few more nails 
with his forehead and then waltz in again. We watched them spin 
around for about an hour, and T thought I could stand and look 
at them as long as they could spin, but they beat me. It was some- 
what suggestive of that boat-ride out from Joppa to look at them. 
I got tired and left and they were still spinning. 

I saw a man sawing wood for fuel in a wood-yard. The saw 
was fixed stationary and he held the wood in both hands and raked 
it over the saw. He said nothing and sawed wood. The man who 
was selling the wood sold it all by weight. It was almost as hard 
as a bone and verv heavy, though perfectly seasoned. 

I passed a bucket-shop— not the Lexington and Chicago kind; 
a place to make buckets. The cooper was sitting flat on the ground. 
He used. both hands and one foot as a hand. He worked on one 
end of the bucket with his hands, while with his big toe and other 
toes he caught the edge of the other end of the bucket and handled 
it with his foot just as well as he could with his hands. He 
handled his foot just as a monkey does and the similarity was so 
striking that I recognized that it scored one for Darwin. In cold 
countries where we wear shoes the toes have naturally lost their 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIENT 



267 



simian dexterity, while in that warm country where they do not 
wear shoes that man had a skill in grasping things with his foot 
that was different from anything in that line I ever saw. My only 
objection to the theory that man is a development from the 
monkey is that in so many instances it is so hard on the monkey. 

At the museum we saw some sculpture that the guides said 
were 6,000 years old. That sculpture must have been made ninety- 
three years before Adam was made, if the Bible chronology is true. 
The people in charge of the museum are the finest Egyptologists 
in the world. 

Some of the Cookies went out on the desert hunting quail. 
They are not so abundant there now as they used to be in the days 
of Moses, from the Bible accounts of them. There were four or 
five gentlemen in the party. They killed nineteen quail, and their 
donkeys, guns, guides and quail drivers cost them twenty dollars. 
The birds looked like our Kentucky quail, or partridges, and field 
larks and flickers or yellow-hammers. They are not so large as our 
Kentucky partridges. These birds are so exactly the color of the 
sand that they hide by lighting on the sand. 

I saw a monkey looking in a hand-glass that he held in one 
hand and arranged his hair with his other hand. Score one more 
for Darwin. 

I saw some Cookies going out to an ostrich farm. Another 
Cookie said to one of them: "What do they raise at an ostrich 
farm?" And the first Cookie answered: "Chickens, of course; 
what else do you suppose they would raise at an ostrich farm?" 
And then the other fellow said: "I thought, maybe, they raised 
lobsters out there." He could have said they raise' sand out there; 
it is in the desert. 

I find that the man who said he would blow up the pyramids 
was named Thompson. 1 saw a woman carrying as babies three 
of her own children. She had a pair of twins', one astride of each 
shoulder and one in her arms. Roosevelt ought to know that 
woman. Cairo has 600,000 inhabitants. One day I heard a native 
Arab band playing as I was sauntering around the city and I went 
to see what was the occasion. It was on a street about twenty-five 
feet wide and in a very fine part of old Cairo. There were about 
thirty musicians in uniforms with some strange looking instru- 
ments and some like ours. The band was in two about equal parts, 
sitting on benches on either side of the street. Sand was spread 
on the street and children were dancing on the sand. I went up 
and took a seat, and a nice looking waiter came and handed me 
cigarettes and coffee in a pretty brass cup. I declined both with 
thanks. While I was sitting there an elegant carriage drove up, 



268 



DOG- FEXXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



and a handsome and richly dressed lady went into the house. I 
did not hear what the occasion was, but think it must have been 
a wedding or a funeral. 

I saw a man on the street with a little white rabbit in his 
hand. The man would put an egg in his mouth and gulp it down 
and then pull the egg out of the rabbit's mouth. He would do it 
with any number of people standing around him in the broad day- 
light on the pavement. It was that kind of a fellow that worried 
Moses by making his walking cane turn to a snake. 

I was walking along the pavement in a part of the city where 
there were not many people passing. I came to a big pile of green 
clover. I might have walked up that pile of clover with the expec- 
tation of walking down it on the other side, but I happened to see 
a camel's tail sticking out from under it. I walked around the 
other side to see if I could find the key to the situation and found 
the camel's head sticking out of the other side. I remembered 
that Jerusalem camel and was glad I did not start to walk over 
that pile of clover. 

In a market I saw in one stall thirty-two varieties of macaroni, 
sixteen varieties of beans and seven varieties of souse. I saw a lot 
of girls that were gathering cigarette butts. They had an amazing 
lot of them. I suppose they are made into cigarettes and sold in 
America, as genuine Turkish cigarettes. I hope they are. I don't 
smoke. I saw a wedding procession in which, among the wedding- 
presents, were camels loaded with household and kitchen furniture. 
If each of Solomons 1.000 wives got such a lay-out of presents as 
that woman had no wonder he was rich. He ran a house-furnish- 
ing store. I saw a hearse in ebony and gold with six horses and 
two drivers and two runners, that would have made Lexington 
think that Barnum's band wagon had come to town. There were 
in the procession fifty blind people chanting the Koran. One of 
our party. Miss Ramsey, daughter of a railroad magnate, died of 
Mle fever in Cairo, after returning from a long trip up the Xile. 
I did not go up the Xile further than Cairo, because that cost $75 
extra and I did not have the money. 



CHAPTER IX. 

Rev. C. A Marshall,, of Cresco, Iowa, took the Upper Nile trip 
and wrote the following account of it : Pj 

ON THE NILE. 

"For I have seen the strange light on the sky, 
I hat leaps unwavering o'er the prophet's tomb/ 7 

— Egyptian Lyrics. 
Egypt is the wonderland of the world; a land of hoary 
antiqui ties a land of unperishing youth. The glory and freshness 

f f 18 v u, 1S , th i f V6r A P art y of fort v °f «ie good peop e 

of the Moltke had trusted still further in Thomas Cook & Son for 
a voyage of pleasure and profit upon its broad stream. Leaving 
Cairo on he eve of If arch 13th m a "wagonlit" for Luxor wf 
were soon beyond the turmoil of the particolored city and the ever! 
lasting cries for "backsheesh." " 

Our sleeper was fairly comfortable, though we missed the 
neatness and genial showing of ivories in the visage of our great 
American institution— the colored porter of the Pullman The 
moon was nearing its full and I could look out of the window 

rL^t ^ Catch glim l 5ses of the river watch 

the date palms dash past like couriers of the night 

„, Here ^ere, too we saw a village of mud huts, where the 
leepmg fellahs had forgotten their troubles, while over all was 

™i ang( l W I', ^ f - the m00n castm = ^ sh ^<>™ over 
scarred rock and broad plain and conjuring up memories of five 

honsand years. Tins, then, was Egypt, land of mystery, land of 
the river, land of undying fame. 

fbr 3 h<! m0mil i g ? a \ ]m ™™g the lurid glare of a tropical 
day when we pulled into Luxor when we went at once to the hotel 
of that name. It is a veritable oasis in the desert. Here the flowers 
were blooming the birds singing and the date palms waving their 
broad arms as though welcoming us to our home. Under mv bed- 
room window a large oleander tree poured its rich fragrance 
through he air and the old stories I read when a boy of the "Fa- 
bian Nights Dream" came wandering back. All this floral delight 



270 COG FENNEL IN THE OEIEXT 

was created by irrigation, Everv third day the water of the Xile is 
let in by many little channels : so the desert rejoices and the roses, 
lilies, cannas with a blaze of tropical flowers I had never seen 
before made a most charming scene and I sauntered out to a seat 
saying, ■■Alabama ! here will I rest.'" But I had reckoned without 
my host, for at once innumerable small flies began to tease with a 
persistence second only to our Iowa flies. They have a special 
regard to the "tenderfoot. v * and an Englishman passing me had his 
face speckled up with them in a queer way. But Cook & Son do 
not allow much rest., and soon the sharp call of the dragoman 
summoned us to donkevs for Karnak. _ 

Perhaps it was a judgment upon me, for my levity m regard 
to the donkey ride at Ephesus. but any way I got hold of a most 
vicious brute. The driver said. "Best donkey m Luxor.. San . His 
name \ss-ouan.** But he was an ass with a record and as many 
trick- as Barnum's mule. His canter was something between a 
bucking broncho's trot and a young elephant's gambol and his 
principal pleasantry consisted in trying to scrub one against the 
wall The donkevs" names seem interchangeable, to suit the 
nationality of visitors. Some lately ridden bv Americans rejoice 
in such names as "Highball," Cocktail'-* and "Whiskey Straight. 
Well, the race began, a wild charge of forty or fifty donkeys upon 
the ruins of Kanak. ■ Amid jeers and scoffs of the Arabs and the 
yells and prods of the drivers : amid dust, heat and flies we were 
off" to the Temples of the Gods. 

-Those temples, palaces and piles stupendous. 
Of which the ruins are tremendous." 
L cannot speak at length of these : any guide book will tell you 
about them. It is the province of the present scribe merely to 
record his own impressions. These I can sum up simply m the 
one word -overwhelming!** Huge columns eighty-eight feet high 
and thirty-eight feet in circumference ; a thousand acres ot rums. 
The records of a grand race in war and peace carved m undying 
characters upon the face of walls that defy the ravages of the 

tooth of time. . , , , ? 

Somehow, though. I never could appreciate the beauty ot 
Egytian sculptures. It was a hobby with my old professor m Eng- 
land but my own boyish idea was that either those old artists had 
queer idess- of beauty or else they had poor specimens ot the 
-human form divine'** to model from. Contrast, for instance, the 
pictures of Eameses driving back his enemies with our statue ot 
Hancock in Washington, or Ibrahim Pasha m Cairo. Contrast 
the long lanky, lean representations of a Cleopatra as we saw her 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 271 

on the walls of the Denderah Temple with the Venus cle Medici 
or Powers Greek Slave; what a difference ; what a contrast ! How 
grotesque the former; how superb the latter. And yet these 
Egyptian sculptures show a breadth of conception, a daring in 
execution and a patience in detail which may well excite the 
admiration of the modern art student. From Karnak we returned 
-a rather jaded cavalcade— to the ruins of Luxor lying at the very 
door of our hotel on the banks of the "Eternal River." These 
Egyptian rums are after all very much alike except to those versed 
m the mysteries of hieroglyphics. However, we "did" the ruins 
patiently and conscientiously. We climbed over prostrate columns ■ 
we stumbled over great masses of fallen stone ; we listened to the 
flowing periods of our dragoman, Mahmoud, with enduring inter- 
est but I confess I was glad to get back to the quiet seat in the 
garden, out of the melting heat, the dust and scramble, and trv and 
collect my thoughts. Our best time came that evening after din- 
ner, when a party of five of us, with one brave lady for a chaperone 
sauntered out again to look upon a scene that can never fade from 
my vision. And the sight was worthy of the scene. The full moon 
poured her pale light on the silent river and the hoary ruins far 
away to the South, the great star Canopus burned with unwonted 

i / i , m] f ry and woe and P° vert y of the fellaheen were 
buried m the hush of night, buried under the soft moonlight that 
cast its cloth of gold as a mantle of mercy over the misery of the 
teiiah and left us only the outlook toward the stars. At our feet 
flowed the Nile m majestic volume, no longer muddy and dark, as 
m the daylight, but blue and silvered under the glory of the 
Egyptian night. While my friends went on to visit a part of the 
rums which they had not seen before, I sat down on a fallen col- 
umn to rest and to dream. I heard the voices of my friends die 
away with their retreating footsteps. The only other live being; 
in the enclosure was the Arab guard, the click of whose key in the 
lock had just shut out all the world from this treasure house of 
centuries. 

Then there rose before me like a dream the grandeur and the 
glory the Oriental splendor and gold, the tread of triumphant 
hosts, the incantations of the priests. All passed before me in pro- 
cession Court and corridor were peopled again with living forms 
Ancient Egypt was "revisiting again the glimpses of the moon." 

i neX ; ™ 7 WaS Slmda .y and our tourists streamed out on the 
plains of Thebes as on other days. I went to the little English 
church m a shady nook of the garden at the hour of Holy Com- 
munion The priest stood with lighted candles on the altar and 
his back to just two communicants, and I could not help asking 



272 DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 

myself : "Where are the nine? 7 ' As I have witnessed the devotions 
of" the faithful Moslems, I must say they set a good example to 
us Christians. Indeed, I have thought sometimes since we started 
on this "Moltke cruise" that, what with a wide-open Cairo and 
repeated Sabbath excursions, some of our Christianity will need 
to be "laid up for repairs" when we return to the land of prayer- 
meetings and Sabbath schools. _ 

In the cool of the Sabbath eve we went on board the steamboat 
"Aniasis " which was to bear us down the Nile. The sun had 
-just set and now looking out over the river to the colossal statues 
of Memnon "that at sunrise played," there came to us the famous 
afterglow of the Egyptian sky. The lights came and went. There 
were orange and pink and purple and gold. 

"Then came a magical, mysterious glow : 
Gold leapt to rose^ rose lightened into flame ; 
The undying sun once more a bridegroom came.'' 

Then it died out and it brought to my mind the dying of a 
o-reat and good man. I thought of Gordon on the upper reaches 
of this same mighty river. Gordon, whose aspiration was to heal 
the "open sore of the world" and destroy forever the blight of the 
slave trade in the great dark continent. Gordon is gone ! I saw 
the statue which an admiring nation erected to his memory m 
Pall Mall, London, a few days ago, but he lives yet m martyrdom, 
a hope, an inspiration and a cheer to the dusky multitude for 
whom he laid clown his life. 

\t 4 -V M Mondav morning, while the shadows are yet on the 
silent stream, the moorings are quietly slipped, we are "a-weigh" on 
the flowino- tide, but half an hour had not passed before we went 
with a dull thud on a sand-bar. which was only the precursor ot 
a good deal of tedious waiting. These Nile pilots have not yet 
learned like their brothers on the Mississippi, to sail on a lignt 
dew" An hour more and we are again afloat and now the pano- 
rama of this wonderful stream that flows for fifteen hundred miles 
of its course without a single stream joining it, is unrolled before 
us Reach slides into reach, opening out vistas of impressing 
beauty and interest. Of all the sons of rock this Nile is the most 
marvelous. Out of the great mothers of Central Africa a thousand 
nameless rills rush to feed the new-born river. Around the great 
inland seas of the Nyanza the majestic stream 30ms the strength 
of unperishing youth. Amid the haunts of the lion and the river 
horse fed by the melted snows of hoary giants that lift their silver 
crowns in the re°ion of the African sky, nowhere 111 all the wide 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIENT m 
r c f4aSS S * P ° Ured hCT *** treasures with 

Egyptian drew Zm this fSZ f " the Egyptians ; while the 
and the inspiration which fflS the , ^ 
No wonder the peoole ho t .f,™ 410 "'? 11 al l the centuries, 
of all their wealth Til vt TT Shlp the " reat riv6r > the source 
granite and ffi^JjS^J?! *f ^ Mocks 5 

of the river through a 1 fat Z time Tl PJ ^ t0 reCOrd the «W 
sage through all the land of ?J pt ^ !J S n ° more ^ mes- 
Nile has begun to rise" S n/^ ^ Senten0e > " The 

bears us onward. Denderah Ahvdo- A T WeU aS the river 
the sacred wolves and XuE'inT V u* 8 mUmmies of 
fins drawn only fa ! ! f-*,' 6 W " Mf " 
years, fresh as though burled ymJZk™^ ° f 3 > 000 
where Britain is storing th el eS wa£ to™! ^ ham ^ 
the ever-growing nomilatinT, „ f 11 1 *° raise more co ™ for 
to the great pvrandd and that 2* ^Z^' eW ™ d > 
shadow tn,. right of L F^encf ^ ^f/P^ lmder ^e 
order rennndll X%SZ£?&£2 JS£ ^^"""T^ 
were looking down upon them" 3 centuries 

of an^o^ft^- ^airo that degenerate child 

pirn -a 5 sji^^sss 

our £ pllnA nd h^ar^T'r ^ V retrace 
go." #e are leavfag b h M us th >f™ the *? d to ^ ™ 
mud-huts of the fellah aud ZJT T ° f the rieh and the 

homes. Egypt may hat a gt^^ldT ° f ^ 

frost and snow, but the show™ f,, & Wmter lln "wrred by 

the Iowa ca n ^l n ^t^ W Ki2L ffl,, f b ™ d acr <* °f 
store houses of the Nile l l27fj\$ I^ Ue than eYen the 

scorching sun as he alps In °bTc ket s to Cur r h^ ^ * the 
into the irrigating trench with I h w» ? P T the slender st ream . 
veranda while the SsZ tL^r Wh ° sits on his 

fields and those hues come ul to me ^ ° n Ws thlrst ? 



CHAPTER X. 



I was at Cairo twelve clays, but though it is one s of the most 
beantif ul anc luxurious cities in the world I became tired of look- 
SnHt it and was glad to get away when the time came. At Cairo 
T wa« at th mo t^remote^part of my tour, from my home and it 
L C feel no- that the first turn of the wheels on the rail- 
was a nappy leeim on ^ ^ road 

way tram that ^M""*^^*^ hum ble little home had 
JotSn roTaplacTthat itXd more to see than any other place 
™ 6 We' came back to Alexandria over the same railway that we 

namely that tte ' stu pidity that did not originate 

Si^SS.3X%. i Mohammedan was stupid 
Sough to do that more than a thousand years ago. 

Cvril the Christian, in Alexandria, had burnt the beautiful 
Cyril the Ui sua won derful woman 

a f S W in J alf mstrv eca se C she did not believe his religion, 

BKSSKSSissrl 

^emVlf Eome.^ti Christian fools from that day to this 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 2 75 

w~ sal 1~ = ar 

saw Tt tl n 7 aS n the i nost wond ^ful phenomenon I ever 

the upper part of the waterspout was not a ver^ We one Tr 1 
very black one and had nothing peculiar about it TlT' i 
appearance of the eloud was flat.' From nea^he mMdl^th 

KVa ste there Tv ent * **** Sha P ed -mewSik h 

horn of a steer. This was about three or four decrees iu Wttf 
and was snnply a continuation of the cloud. Erom the end of ?hk 
roll of woV Va % a White / 0meth -g that looked Hke arfmmense 
lout fi c "i 11 °' 0meS , r ° m a cardin g mac hme. This oceupmd 
about fifteen degrees and went toward the water at an ZSf Tt 

S: S y ^iSr A r out f s 8 * toS " « th 

water naa its line been continued, the water was flyine in smiv 
and nnst as if being twisted with a whilrwind, and Se sS 
of the sea up to the end of the roll that looked like wool it looked 
like smoke. We could not see that it was moving. I saw it com 
plete from top to bottom for ten or fifteen minutes and hen t 
ceased at the water and gradually disappeared from the water nu 
occupying another ten or fifteen minutes I had he^ J * P ' 
spouts from my childhood and had always thought S a fig^ 
of the sailors' imagination, but there it was, and seeing was beTev 
mg. The officers of the ship did not seem to regard it al a matter" 
of any danger. It looked to me that a whirlwind wa WW the 
water into a great coil and pumping it up into that cCd The 
sea was pretty rough in the morning of that day, but I Cd gotten 

T/cfof Sh^tir ^ f ^ 1 ^ ^Ati^Z 
ence ot such a thing as a waterspout, and if, before seeing that 
one the ship's captain had told me that the waterspou or y wa 
only a sailors yarn it would have been just what 1 ! had alwlys 



276 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

believed and I would have told Kim so. The water spout, as I 
had seen it. was not a large column of water pouring straight up 
into the sky, as I had seen it in the pictures, nor did it seem liable 
to affect such a ship as ours, as the stories that I had heard 
seemed to warrant : but it was not a thing that I would have liked 
to be any nearer to in the small boats that took us to the big ship 

at Joppa. , T 

Findins that I had been mistaken about the waterspout, 1 
concluded to ask the captain about that story so often alluded to, 
metaphorically, as "casting oil upon the troubled waters? I had 
asked some intelligent Cookies about it, and they thought it was a 
fact and when I asked the captain about it I supposed he would 
certainly tell me that that was only a sea myth, that had no exist- 
ence any more substantial than its popular use among writers and 
speakers But. to my surprise, this captain, whose knowledge ot 
seafaring had put him in charge of this great ship, told me that 
in storms at sea the ocean could be calmed by throwing oil on it, 
and in answer to my further questions he told me that m a storm 
it was the custom for a sailor to go to the bow and drop overboard 
about two pounds of oil at once and that they would somewhat 
.low up the ship while he was doing so, and he told me how often 
or at what spaces they would throw over the oil, but I have tor- 
o-otten that, but I am under the impression that it was perhaps as 
much as an hour apart, and he told me that that ship was then 
prepared with the oil and the arrangements for that purpose. 

There was nothing in his appearance and nothing in the cir- 
cumstances or general deportment of the man that would warrant 
him in deceiving me in this matter, unless it is a rule > among 
officers, under such circumstances, to say anything that the) think 
will promote a feeling of security among their passengers; and 
yet I do not believe that two pounds of oil or 2,000 barrels of oil 
would have any perceptible effect upon the sea. 

Eev Marshall said to me that he thought that nearly all 
the miracles m the X. T. could be accounted for on natural 
principles and he instanced the story ot Jesus walking on the 
water. If that storv can be accounted for on a natural principle 
and Captain Dempwolf s story about calming the Atlantic Ocean 
or the Mediterranean Sea by dropping on either of them two 
pounds of oil. so that it would save the Moltke is true, a gdl of oil 
that Jesus might have had with him would have calmed the little 
sea of Galilee so that the little boat he was in would have been 
saved I believe the testimony of Captain Dempwolf is worth 
more than that of any unknown man who wrote the N. T. centuries 
ao-o Thomas is the only one of the disciples who insisted upon 



DOG VK.NNKI. IX THE OR IK N'T 2rr 

PiiiiiiiP 

nson had to show for his story of Jonah and Tthe extpt ^ 

ntie was Aetna, still standing as pprtflinlv a -t? ii J 

story about Vulcan and that^C was an ot/one for 



278 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



before there was any Christianity, and Christian logic demands 
that that story of Vulcan should be accepted as true until some 
Christian can prove that Vulcan is not. to-day, under that moun- 
tain still forging the thunderbolts for Jove that rend the heavens 
with a crash, when Jove is on his ear, because of some dissatisfac- 
tion with the way people are doing, and blasts their churches and 
new-fangled Jerusalem religions with his lightning as the news- 
papers are continually reporting. 

It was Sunday night when I saw Aetna and it may be that 
Vulcan, while not' a Christian, was obeying the law of the land 
that had been Christianized since he began business there, and 
would not "work on Sunday and had banked his fires and gone to 
bed early that night so as to get an early start on Monday morning 
The Captain told me that I could not see Stromboli without 
sitting up until midnight, and even then my chance to see it would 
be a poor one, so I went to bed without trying to see it. The 
approaches to Italy, the clear sky, the beautiful sea, the picturesque 
towns and islands and boats, and the delightful atmosphere and 
the far-off snow-capped mountains were all that the pen of poet 
or brush of painter or modern kodak could warrant you m expect- 
iuo- I saw awav off in the clouds something that looked ike it 
might be a real' mountain on the earth and then looked ike it 
might be one of those clouds that sometimes look so much like 
ountains, but I had an idea that it might be \esuvms and was 
finaUv assured by those who knew it that it was the famous volcano. 
I could see no smoke. I had never heard that any city ordinance 
of Naples required that Vesuvius should c » ns ™%\°™™T +Q 
"See Naples and die" was the proverb, but I felt inclined o 
postpone the dying until I got home and wrote a i book ^ about it 
and took time to consider the matter of dying. The bay ot JNaple* 
T uppose, has the reputation of being the most beautiful place 
L the world. When morning came we found ourselves lying a 
anchor fn the bay. There were many small boats around and there 
w£e nartieTof men and women singing and dancing and then 
oc^sionally one would stop and open out a parasol and, invert i g 
H hold it to catch anv money that might be thrown them for the 
erformance The women were pretty and were all bare-headed, 
Tw" a se throughout the whole city. In some of these boats 
were women cooking for anybody that would buy. - ^ 
small boats had in them large piles of sardines off of which men 
^d boys were pulling the heads. About that time some . very ele- 
gant lady of our Cookie eompanw said to me on the Moltke. It 
IZ will sav in your book what you say to me here I will send 
o en doha "for it." The lady who said this was the one who 



BOG FENNEL IN THE OEIENT 



279 



wanted the bottle of whiskey at Constantinople. She is a r'eh 
woman and a subscriber to this book, and must judge, herself 
whether in the book I have talked as I talked to her 

Naples has 250,000 inhabitants. It is a model of cleanliness 
and beauty. A railway station there is as beautiful as a picture 
gallery with nfany beautiful fresco paintings in it. The streets 
are of solid stone. But at Naples I was occupied with thoughts 
ot \ esuvius and what it had done at Herculaneum and Pompeii 
m which I had been greatly interested since I read "The Lps^ 
Days of Pompeii" in my boyhood. We were put into a beautiful 
railway tram and carried out to Pompeii. In A. D. 79 an eruption 
ot \ esuvius covered Herculaneum and Pompeii. These two towns 
are each about six miles from Vesuvius and I think about six miles 
apart. Herculaneum was covered with lava and but little ha* 
been done m the way of excavating it. The lava so ran into the 
city and solidified, when it cooled, that it will be very difficult if 
at all possible, ever to exhume it. Pompeii, though, was only 
covered with ashes that fell on it, and that city has been largely 
excavated and is m almost perfect preservation. The ashes were 
fifteen feet over the highest part of the city. The part of it that 
has been excavated is four miles around, and at the limits of the 
excavation you see the ashes now, fifteen feet deep but almost as 
solid as the natural soil. It is thought that about half the city 
has been exhumed, but that is the more beautiful part of it The 
streets and the walls of the houses, inside and out, have been so 
perfectly cleaned that it is hard to realize that it was ever covered 
with ashes. 

The streets are in solid stone, and are so narrow that chariots 
and other wheeled vehicles could only pass each other at certain 
places, and the iron tires of the wheels have worn ruts in the solid 
stone pavements in some places as deep as five inches. There was 
no arrangement for vehicles with one horse to them, as is evi- 
dent from the fact that right in the middle of the streets at all 
crossings, there is a stone as high as the narrow sidewalk on either 
side and m crossing this street all persons had to step from the 
sidewalk onto that stone and then the next step onto the opposite 
sidewalk, and the two or four horses in their vehicles had to divide 
so as to go each side of that stone in the center of the street. We 
walked, I suppose, through four or five miles of these streets and 
through the buildings until we were all too tired to walk any more 
The whole city is built of marble and stone and no part of it was 
destroyed except that the roofs, which were all tiles, had all been 
broken m and destroyed and that part had been removed. In some 
instances, in order to preserve paintings and sculpturing on the 



280 DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIENT 

walls, some houses had had the tile roofs put on them since the 
excavation. There are many paintings on the frescoes and smooth 
marble walls. We came into a large court in which was the temple 
of Apollo. In this temple there were perhaps a half dozen pieces 
of statuary, all life-size and of men or gods, but only one of these 
was as it" had been found at the excavation. It was in almost 
perfect order and was a tine piece of statuary. The others were 
restorations— either statues to which missing parts had been sup- 
plied or. in some instances, probably the whole statue was modern 
and had been modeled from one that had formerly occupied that 
place. In some instances the pedestal of the statue was the original 
one. though the statue was modern. The guides carefully told us 
of each case that was a restoration and there was no disposition to 
have it appear that anv modern thing there was ancient. There 
was a solid stone or marble altar there upon which they sacrificed 
to Apollo. The altar was large enough to hold a whole large beef 
' at once. 

Then there was a forum that was about 300 feet by 100, 
having a large platform upon which the judges sat that was eight 
or ten feet above the level of the floor. The floors m all cases were 
marble. There was a temple to Jupiter and one to Mercury and 
an arch to Xero and one to Caligula, and another large altar ir 
marble on which was sculptured a procession of priests leading a 
bull to sacrifice. Then there was a stock exchange that had m 
it a room about a half acre in size. Over this was a roof of fries. 
At different places we saw lead pipes, the largest of which wpt 
about three inches in diameter. These were not made at all lilw 
our modern lead pipes. They were made by having long, flat 
strips of lead, then laving them in a groove and hammering the 
pieces in half-round strips so that when two halves were put 
together and the edges beaten together they formed a pipe, but 
it was a verv imperfect thing and was only used to run water 
where there would not be much pressure on it. Twenty-five thou- 
sand people are supposed to have lived in the city, but it is larger 
than most ancient cities of that much population, because a great 
part of the city is occupied with the very large houses of the rich 
and with laro-e public buildings. I am not certain whether it is 
estimated that the whole city has 25,000 people or only the part 
of the city that has been exhumed— risen from its ashes m a novel 
sense. One of the main streets of the town is the street of Abun- 
dance, and the cornucopia is in evidence in many places and many 
forms. That street is abundantly wide for carriages to pass each 
other. I would say twentv feet wide, beside a sidewalk on either 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 281 

• order f ° Ur *** The ™ A side walks are in P^ecf 

As we came out of a narrow street into the street of Abun- 
dance there was a perfectly preserved drinking fountain, but there 
was no water m it There was a brass tube from which water 
once flowed. It was about a half inch in diameter and abou two 

tub" rio r °t r that chmie ? might drh,k - 1 tZ 

t«be was too low for grown people to drink without stooping 
There seems never to have been any cup or vessel of anv kino for 
any one to armk out of and the only way was for eachpe son to 
take the end of the spout into his or her. mouth. In stooping to 

P^adt^tTtLl^ Jtfi^itiS g 
m the shape the hand would be m placing it there. There wa 

wav n V^r" — to + SUpP ° Se rt had been ™* j-st flat 
way. I call special attention to this in connection with the wear- 

Mnglv n°Zss y ^"r' ChriStlanS 3nd Mohammedans e"! 

I; mgh profess has been done m some eases that thev show. In 
that spot on that fountain the human hand with a large part of 
a man s or woman's weight upon it was pressed upon the rock and 
m the process of drinking was probably scrubbed around some 
™ s at a P lace where the dust from the flinty stone 
street would settle upon it, and perhaps the place was generally 
damp from the fountain, and that in some hundreds of years that 
that fountain had been used in that , wav, that wearing of the 
stone would have resulted is .just what we would naturally expect. 

nff / e rt7 dlf ! erent thm =' however > from th e alleged kissing 
off of St. Peter's toe, m St. Peter's, in Home, and the alleged 
wearing off of the steps of the "sacra scala" in Rome by pilgrims 
going up there on their knees. . The latter two are simply samples 
nJSl ~ Y el 'f><f "«» tl«t are palmed off upon ignorant 
people, oi people who have motives in claiming to believe those 
Tilings. 

Then there was a triangular forum. In most of the immense 
amount ot masonry used in Pompeii there was no cement used. 
The stones were cut to fit each other perfectly and were held in 
place only by their own gravity. 

There were, side by side, two theaters; one for tragedy and 

°?L J 7\ I 1 " 7 T re f ° rmed by rOWS of marble seat « that 
circled around to the stage as our theater seats do in this day 

Ihese theaters were so constructed in a natural depression in the 

ground that the highest seats were on a level with the surrounding 



282 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIEXT 



part of the city and all persons had to come into the theater at the 
top of the seats. In some places that seemed to be the cheaper class 
of 'seats the steps that led between the ends of the rows of seats were 
so worn that they were hardly steps at all. but simply inclined 
planes. Back of " the stage, separated by a space of fifty yards, 
were handsome quarters for the actors. The columns in front of the 
long porch in front of those actors* quarters were perfectly pre- 
served. Each of those theaters would have seated three or four 
thousand people. 

Gladiators fought in these theaters and there were elegant 
barracks provided for them to stay in. The supposition is that 
the onlv covering of these theaters was a heavy canvas that was 
stretched over them. 

There was a temple of Isis from which it was thought that a 
statue spoke to the people. There was a very handsome house that 
had belonged to a man named Cornelius Bufus. There was m the 
house a statue of the owner, with his name on the pedestal. By 
the side of the house, as costly as land must have been there there 
was a- <mrden fifty feet by twenty-five. It was surrounded by 
beautiful pillars, nearly all of which were in an almost perfect 
state of preservation. 

Very great pains and expense were expended on bath rooms. 
Some of' these bath rooms were thirty feet square and about 
twentv-five feet high, and the walls, ceiling and floor were all made 
of marble and were all doubled so as to leave a space oi about six 
inches between the two walls all around the whole room. Outside 
of each one of these bath rooms there were furnaces so constructed 
that the heat from them passed entirely around the whole bath 
room -ides, tops and bottoms, and thus the water was warmed tor 
baths large enough to swim in. These bath rooms were ornamented 
with sculpture and paintings on the marble walls and mosaics. _ 

When we came to a certain place we were shown a great wine 
cellar I was so surprised at the proportions of the place that I 
wandered around in it so long that I found the whole party had 
o-one off and left me when I came out. I ran on to overtake them 
and found that the guides had made the ladies stop while the gen- 
tlemen had o-one on. I went on and found that the gentlemen 
had all been taken into a house of such shady reputation that no 
ladies were allowed to enter. The paintings on the walls ot tins 
house were such as it would not do even to mention. I he most 
remarkable of these paintings had. m some modern day. had a 
strong box fitted around it so that it could be locked up and the 
o-nide'had the kev m his pocket and. having exhibited it when they 
first o-ot into that house. I did not get to see it. From the descrip- 



DOG FENNEL 1 1ST THE ORIENT 



283 



tion that the others gave me it was quite a naughty picture, but 
it showed that somebody who painted that picture had a high sense 
of the ridiculous. On the walls of this house were many pictures 
in keeping with the reputation of the place, and their colors were 
well preserved. There were many rooms in the house, in each of 
which was a double bed. These beds were all made of solid stone 
and at the head of each bed was a stone pillow the whole width 
of the bed. That pillow was about six inches high. 

There was one house that is known as the "house of the bear," 
from a picture of a bear in it. I could not see why the bear was 
so remarkable as to give its name to the house. It may have been 
accidental, or there may have been some reason for it that I did 
not understand. In the "house of the bear" there was a fountain 
that had over it a round and concave picture about six feet in 
diameter. The picture was that of a pretty woman and some pretty 
surroundings and it was a mosaic made of colored shells. It was in 
a perfect state of preservation. 

There was a soap factory and the kettles on the furnace held 
about ten gallons each and were made of lead. I would have 
thought they would melt. There was a butcher's shop and the 
extraordinary wear of wheels in the stone street that went to it 
indicated that it must have been a place where a large and very 
active business had been conducted. A lady called my attention 
to the very deep tracks that seemed to terminate at the butcher 
shop and we traced that same peculiarly deep track for a consider- 
able distance through the city. That man was the Armour of 
Pompeii. He may have had the job of furnishing the meat that 
was burnt on the altars in their temples. 

I suppose the priests there, like the priests in the Bible, let 
the gods fill up on smoke while the priests ate the good fat beef 
and mutton. There was a wine shop. There were large earthen- 
ware jars with big mouths in which the wine was kept, and these 
jars will hold water now. There was a baker shop and in thai shop 
were found some loaves of bread that are now preserved in the 
Pompeiian museum. There were a number of mills for grinding 
grain. The upper mill stone was also a hopper that would hold 
about three bushels of grain and the stone that turned was the 
lower one. The mill was constructed much like one of our coffee 
mills. There was no arrangement for separating the bran from the 
flour. It was whole wheat flour. 

On one wall we saw written in nice red lettering, in Latin, of 
course, a notice of a public election. It occupied a space about five 
feet long. The colors were well preserved and the «man who put 
the lettering on the wall, which was in manuscript style, showed 



281 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OBIEXT 



that lie was an expert in his art that compared favorably with 
brush-writing experts of this day. The man who wrote that election 
notice there could no more have anticipated how a man could read 
that in nearly 20:00 years from the time he wrote it than a bill- 
poster in Lexington to-day could anticipate any conditions or cir- 
cumstances that would make it possible for men 2000 years from 
now to read an election notice stuck up in Lexington to-day. 
Shows we ought to be careful what Ave write. Wonder if. in 2000 
years from now. anybody can read a single line of what I am 
writing'. 

We saw a bank. On the marble vestibule of that bank there 
were written in mosaic colored stones the words : "'Salve Aurum" — 
save your gold. They counted gold in those days by weighing it. 
I went into Cook's bank in Cairo to get $2.50 in American money 
changed into Egyptian. While I was waiting there a Cookie came 
in and poured out on a counter a pile of American gold and said: 
"There are $501."' He wanted it changed into other money. The 
teller shoveled it into his scales, and all in a half minute said: 
"There are $502," and shoved him the change for that amount. 
I have been a bank clerk, but that kind of a way of counting money 
and no more time than that to look for counterfeits dazed me. 

We then visited the house of Vetti, that is called the "new 
house.*'" It is the handsomest residence in the city. I did not 
know why it was called the "new house."" There was probably 
something in some inscription about it that spoke of it as the "new 
house." or there may have been some evidence that it was right 
new when Pompeii was covered with ashes. In Latin the word 
"vetus" means "old."* and the name Vetti may have been the way 
of spelling it in those days, and the people may have called it 
"the new house"' because a man named "Old" lived in it. From 
indications that I saw in the city these people would have been 
liable to get up just that kind of a joke. The paintings in the 
'•new house" are the finest in the city. In the dining rooms of the 
"new house'* the tables are of marble and are fixed permanently to 
the floor. The tables are perfectly preserved. There are bed- 
rooms and a library : the library walls being almost full of paint- 
ings, the preserved coloring of which, had it been a Christian 
church, and the pictures of Christian things would now be shown 
as being miraculous. There is for this house a complete kitchen, 
where the pots are still in their places on the range where they 
were when Vesuvius buried the town. The pots look as if they 
were made of lead. On the side of the main entrance door of the 
"new house" there is a picture of a fight between two game cocks. 
They have damaged each other's plumage very much and one of 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 285 

^ coeb hafl in his mouth a long feather that he has pulled out 
of the other one I did not hear that this picture had any speck 
significance, but I suppose it had. If it had been in C uckv i 
would have meant that two Democratic roosters had gle up agafn 
each other. There were so many things in the "new house*? that 
could be damaged by vandal relic hunters that strong modern door 

locked! 611 P ^ main eDtranCe ° f that house - d » ™ St 
Pompeii is a walled city and the wall around it, so far as it 
is exhumed, is m a good state of preservation. We went in and 
out through the regular gates of the city where guard and Lde 
are afi the time on hand, and the city is perfectly preserved. g 

We saw a stable with stone mangers in it. I would have 
expected to find some such stone mangers as those in The alleged 
stable at Bethlehem, where the infant Jesus was said to have laid 
m a manger, Pad it really ever been a stable. 

Then in Pompeii we visited the residence of Panza It had 
a fine aquarium. That picture that was in the box that was locked 
up was a woman who had a pair of balances in her hand and some- 
thing m each side of the scales. One side, that was goinc no sLwinl 
hat it was the lighter side, had a big bag of goldTft. ? i smZe 
the picture was intended to teach a truth, and from what I heard 
about i , I do not see why it was any tougher thing for us to stand 

tothett d W °™ d men .. a11 t0gether ' than the P-ee of a uary 

It n ^ at Ath ? S ' th8t We did ' women and ™* together 7 
look at, though none of us stood very long— it was too rich for 

my blood-that had been put there to be^een b the peo fie o 

Athens that was at that time the most cultivated city aTt the 

world has ever seen, and even up to this day, and that statue Thi he 

Stadium, having been excavated from the rubbish of centuries 

has been put back m the most conspicuous part of the Stadium to 

be seen there by the creme de la creme of modern civilization who 

are expected to go to Athens from all over the world to see The 

renewed Olympic games; the same idea, though in a more dignified 

of ™' r l ^ ^ n rT • T in the SJmn^mms and foot-ball teams 
of our colleges. It 1S the same old question about sexual matters 
as to whether a self-appointed official like old Tonv Comstock in 
tne W uI°ted ^ole matter for the Governmen of 

the United States or whether this Government is old enough, and 
tag enough, and rich enough to appoint as its own officials men 
and women of distinguished morals and intelligence, to decide what 
« nght about these It is the same old question as to whether a 
Methodist preacher like Southgate of Lexington, and a local college 
professor hke Pucker of Georgetown, can arrest me and send me 



28G COG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 

to jail and to the penitentiary, as they did, because I think these 
things are, from all points of view, moral, economic and sanitary 
things to be decided by accredited experts rather than by men oi 
no distinction for their knowledge of science and who want to 
punish religious heresy under some guise or disguise. 

I was told by Infidels and Christians that on the Moltke and 
at various parts of the cruise, there was conduct between men and 
women. Christian and Infidel, the details of which are not 
admissible in print. I do not know personally of any of these 
things, though I saw many things, all among Northern people, m 
this line that indicated that these stories were true I do not say 
that it is to my credit to say it, but there were two Infidel women 
on that cruise 'both of whom were perfectly respectful to me, and 
true friends to me, one of whom was perhaps the most intellectual 
woman on the boat, and the other the greatest wit on the boat, 
and vet I saw in these two women conduct that I could not war- 
rant in any woman friend of mine ; and yet it is almost certainly 
the fact that either of these women is better than I am and better 
and more honest than any priest or preacher on the boat A Mrs. 
McCarthy, a devout Irish Catholic woman, who seemed to me to 
be a kind,' good woman, told with pride to a party in which I was 
that she had gambled and won money at Monte Carlo and that 
.he was going there again for that purpose. It was for saying 
things like this that the woman said she would give me ten dollars 
if I would say them in my book. 

Out at Pompeii there is, outside of the gates of the city, a 
museum that contains all the relics of importance that were 
exhumed from Pompeii. Among these, naturally, the most promi- 
nent are the remains of people who were buried by ^ esuvius. 1 do 
not think there is any disposition on the part of the people m 
charge there now to deceive anybody about these remains and yet 
I am of the opinion that the people who see them as a genera 
thing, do not understand them and I do not think I do. These 
bodies are kept under glass cases, but can be clearly seen The 
impression I got from the guides is as follows : The ashes fell upon 
Pompeii so suddenly that many of the people did not have time 
to get into houses and fell in the streets and were buried, of course 
where they fell. The material that came from the volcano packed 
down around these bodies in the different shapes in winch they tell, 
and before the bodies lost their natural shape this material became 
.olid enough to remain in the shapes of the various bodies after the 
bodies shrank from decomposition. In excavating there were some 
of these moulds of bodies found so preserved that plaster of Paris 
was poured into the moulds and whatever remained of the bodies, 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



28? 



which was only a few of the bones in most instances, was covered 
with the plaster, or partly covered, so that the real bones of some 
ot those people are found sticking out of parts of the plaster. It 
seems like an improbable story that these casts could have been 
obtained that way, but there were probably between 25,000 or 
50,000 people thus buried and in excavating the city the diggers 
probably destroyed thousands of these moulds that they found in 
the ashes, but found enough of them in such condition as to get the 
plaster casts of about twenty bodies that are now in that museum. 
These bodies are of men and women and are in such various atti- 
tudes as one would naturally imagine they had been caught A 
strange thing, however, is that all of these bodies appear to have 
been naked, as there seems to be no appearance of clothes on the 
plaster casts, and it would seem that the clothes would have 
remained after the bodies had lost their shape from shrinkage. 
That fact I could not understand. Several of the corpses had the 
impressions of belts, apparently of leather, around their waists and 
on these belts were what were supposed to be little leather boxes 
somewhat in the shape of our modern money pocket-books, in which 
they carried their money. In one case two of these bodies are 
. clasped in each other's arms. They are supposed to be a mother 
and her daughter, but how they could find that out I could not 
see. It was scarcely possible to distinguish the sexes. I think that 
most people who see those bodies think thev are petrifactions. 
I do not think that anybody there is trying to deceive others about 
those bodies, but it seemed to me that nobody understood perfectly 
how those moulds had been obtained. There would seem to be no 
sense m trying to practice any fraud about the bodies, as the 
whole city tells the main facts of its history in unmistakable terms. 

On March 26th a party of fifty-one of us started to make the 
ascent of Vesuvius. The day was beautiful and the weather very 
pleasant— a little too warm, possibly, in same parts where we had 
to climb. We started in carriages, each having three horses side 
by side; the carriages, as in all cases that we met, having their 
tops turned back in all good weather. 

Vesuvius is 4,280 feet high from the level of the sea, and the 
mountain starts almost at the sea level. It took us fully three 
hours to go up to the crater, the distance that we had to travel 
being probably eight miles. A suburb of Naples runs all the way 
from Naples to the mountain and fully a half mile up the moun- 
tain. There were some things of interest on the road going through 
that suburban town. It was old looking, but in it were some villas 
that were very handsome. In all old cities the purpose seems to 
have been to make the insides of the homes the more attractive 



288 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



part of them. In America probably the greater part of the expense 
of a house is put on the outside. We may say the American idea 
is vanity, or we may say that the owner of the house is not selfish 
and wants more to gratify the eye of the public than his own. The 
main entrances of these villas would be comparatively plain and 
yet through these main entrances you could see large grounds and 
iine trees and beautiful grass and flowers. The street on which 
we traveled was fifty or sixty feet wide. On both sides of this 
street, and over this street is built a palace that looks as if it might 
be only a hundred or two years old. It is larger than, but on the 
same plan as, the house of Dives, the gentleman who used to live 
in Jerusalem, and who the New Testament says is now in hell. 
I saw a macaroni manufactory. Mark Twain described the mac- 
aroni at one of these factories as being full of flies and dirt. But 
the place I saw had tons of macaroni hanging on trestles outside, 
and true it was a broad place in the street, but everything around 
there was clean and there was no dust nor anything that seemed 
untidy or unsanitary. I had long wanted to go into a macaroni 
manufactorv. I never got to go into one, but. from what I saw 
there I can tell you just how they make it. They take a long, 
straight hole and put dough around it and then cut it up in pieces 
and they charge just as much for the hole as they do for the dough. 
From the looks of that establishment I would say that the man 
who owns it has the "dough." We saw lots of pretty bare-headed 
women and some beastly fat priests, who reminded me of what 
Ingersoll said about old Grover Cleveland— "could pull off his 
shirt without unbuttoning the collar." 

There were many gray-headed beggars that ran the streets 
along by the carriages and begged for money. I saw a man both 
of whose legs were cut off so that they were only about six inches 
long, and that man ran by the side of the carriages and begged, 
and kept up with us for a little distance when we were going a 
pretty good up-hill gait. It may have been crawling more than 
running, but he got there all the same. We began to come to 
houses and walls built of lava. I was up on the front seat and a 
New York jeweler named Weaver and three ladies who sat near 
us at the table on the Moltke, were in the carriage. I did not have 
any monev, but Weaver had plenty of it, and he so pitched it out 
to the beggars that the police along the road and our driver would 
have to stop the carriage and disperse the gang of beggars old 
and young, and of both sexes, to get along with the carriage. As I 
did not have any money to help the poor devils, all I could do 
was to encourage their getting Weaver's money, and I laughed at 
the way the beggars were worrying the police and the driver and 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 289 

thus encouraged them to follow and <,,.( w 

was a queer kind of a fellow but 5 Wea ! er s money. He 
him, and though he Mowed* hi * mSe ° f the ridiculous in 

along i ner ei b w]^™£^l2?7^ ^ 
as he did those beggars. He called tW f Wh ° le tour as much 
-re two rich wifows, S^^ST^TSi!'^ ^ 
forty summers, all hell-bent nr, ' and a maiden of 

d. q., and any of the three w ! f£ * g 1Mmed and ^oing it P 
of about fort], at J£ ?™ ^ oTa hat a »^ 

^^nf^^^^- «^ that he had 
I didn't have any-and pitched it It ■ g 1 h&d ~ he ^ 
beggars just so as to keep he tbil P -]T at 8 time > to the 
and scrambling for it They finfC^?^ ° r ° wd f °U»™g «« 
broke down running up the mountl V™* ° & because <W 
they spotted that carriage and TuH t fl iff to0 > 
I was up in front , with 8 my ong graf hal and 
we came back that efen™ wbt 1 i i d beard ' and when 

Weaver was the only ^ the whole^ ^ beg ' gare and 

so I can hardly write for° the wT <snn «.* h « t makes me laugh 
about it. I wild tel you about t as Z when 1 thi nk 

tain. When the beggars finally cCZ T ^ d ° Wn the m °nn- 
musmians that folhfwe 1 our J C a £ for' T V**" band ° f » ine 
sang and played beautifully. ThefwSe all t T° mileS md 
looking men. I had heard W r> « handsome, strong 
and declaiming an or tion at the ^ r ™ning up a hill 

Practice, but those jSSZ iol^Z ttk^Vf ^ 
horses could go, and nlavino- mJ™„ V P V • m11 as fast as our 
time, beat the band-that fs anvT , Smging at the ™ 
In America it's a Tea accom^L + + eYer Saw but that one. 
of those fellows therf can 2f T^l °oT g Italian ' bnt a »7 
Doodle'' .ncomplnnenttnn^tilily ^ 

eity ^Z^^X^tr" ^ «» 
The Cooks are building tL eLtri road audT ^ 18 ?° W there ' 
ar railway that is on the volcano not %tl ° ra , the 
traveled up was finely made andhad t™F*e that we 
get up the mountain/ In some cases rh and forth to 
room to turn when the it to X a i CtnC Cars Wl11 n °t have 
start back on neS S o ft ° " lndined ^ a mt 
at the ends of th'se waZ wl 7 CarS witW turning 

drove for muJtCSh Item tTY * *? tbe lava bed *> and we 
until it was s so t fat as ^ poled oT that has melted 

over on top of the mountaS it 



290 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OR1KNT 



the sictea of the volcano at the rate of perhaps two or three or four 
rite an hour. This lava got itself into many fantastic shapes 
he o-eneral appearance was like waves ot the sea rolling and 
le* pin* and fcssing their spray. Much of this molten rock looked 
Wit mar W lain cold and solid for centimes alter it had 
ooo led off and 'then steam or gas or dynamite or something had 
n le an awSl explosion under it and thrown up from the sides 
o he mountain great stones that would lie as large as a sma 
dweUing house, and these stones had come up through the .olid 
I 1 va and borne it all up again and then more hot lava had run ov 
it all. and sometimes these immense rocks had stuck m tte a a 
when it was soft and all was now as hard as flint. The ta»t btva 
that we came" to had run down there m 1831. Then we came to a 
a e where in 1858, the lava had run down over the splendid road 
t le re tovding on and a new road had to be built a ong there 
when t o cool enough and parts of the first road could be seen 
K/thexe below us. looking like that .we -re trave mg over 
except that it looked like it had not been used foi tear,. Hie 
driver pointed out a place where the lava had destroyed a village 
n 18i: I do not know how large the village was, but I would 
" es two or three thousand inhabitants, and the surface _ cnvered 
bv the lava was probably three or four hundred acre,. The whole 
- Ua e was so completely covered with the lava that no one now 
would know that any village had ever been there There was no 
enor t at anv excavation that had ever been made there to uncove 
it I did not hear, but think the people were not buried there as at 

were be-innin £ then to get up to where we could see very plan 
what Vesuvius was doing, though we were about tour miles ot 
road from the crater and 2.000 feet below it- 

Then we came to a place where the lava had flowed over and 
de^roved a Part of the road in 1895, and a new route had been 
euSred Si the lava quarried out of the way and we were 
teS on the new part of the road. I was astonished to see 
how manv eruptions there had been in late years, but all these 
deemed to have poured out only this molten rock called lava except 
the o that in lire rear 19 threw out the ashes thai .destroyed Pom- 
eii While the mountain, at that time, threw out enough lava to 
Cv HerTulau.eum entirely out of sight as it is to this day, in one 
direction, the ashes and scoria that it, at that time, threw out m 



DOG FExWEL IN THE OEIEKT 2n 

other perfoHBancerof C n t^ t n td whSt 161 W ° f the 
occasion furnished such an inordinate ^nh of ^ ° n , that 

many curious questions for con et ure ntte 1 i f ° f 
extraordinary of all mountain. Tt ; i } ^7 ° f thls most 
only a question of ?Lpos^Z of thV Certain that « is 

will all be destroyed Tv CuXs Sf of . j?* 8 ' ^ N *P^ 
remarkable that all voU" ted out 5 Z totZ ^ ? ™ S 
It reminds me of the sua-s-estim, 'ft -u n pS of moun tams. 

that the large J^^S^t^^™™* 
started, which was certainlv h«wn, l IS n VeSL ™s 

it broke through 11 "Sort ^ a poinj la } 'T 1 8g °' 

to the level of the sea as the base „f 38 almost down 

through there because the ermt f til and " broke 

more contemptible is that class of f!l!T How infinitely 

world was called into existence out°of notL^toOO ™ * ^ 
when m t hp -npirlv 9 nnn . xi j ± ; ULI1I - U 6 OIU y o.uuu years ago, 



that the firP nf Vn • 1 maeea tne common belief 

SKelrnl ol: W Urn Tt\ oTl tnbT^Whe^rt ° f 
continents will rise and fall, such I t^L^o^ttZZ 



t!» i»» in our route horn, b * S ™'""« *■ 

I «» not .nolmed to Mi,™ «,, „„,„ StCLSL 



292 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



if not infernal, fire of the earth. I incline to think that down 
under that mountain, probably less than ten miles deep, there is a 
reservoir of oil or coal that neither Rockefeller nor Baer has 
tapped, or gas enough to supply the world if it could lie harvested; 
hut how it burns with no more air than it seems to get is what 
I don't know. Next ! What comes out of the mountain that is 
commonly called smoke is. I think, about such "omtatad 
steam and smoke as comes from a locomotive. The cratei from 
which Herculaneum and Pompeii were coverd is. I would guess 
ten times as large as the one now doing business,, and it is a halt 

n le etween the nearest two points of the two craters, and the 
„ crater, the one in operation probably ever since then near 

3 000 years, is a hundred feet higher than the old one. The old 

y t wi' ..i.i,,,- nff its head" in A. D. 19. and is not so high 
one probable blew on it; neau m x - , , . 

now as before that eruption. It seems temporarily, at least, to 
have tone out of business and is now tor repairs and u 

rohablT getting on a "good ready'' to wipe Naples off the map 
me oi the=e times. The people there are all the time afraid of 
hfvol ai o and naturally appreciate that it would be phenomena 
ome of these tunes it' does not destroy Naples, but the time is 
o ndefin it and possiblv so far off that each generation is willing 
to r 1 1 « that old mountain hangs like a Damocles sword 

siueb ui tucinu _ i i • i-iund as to what tnat 

flying around and trying to make up his mmd as ^ 
mountain was trying to d TO* o d crow ^ somehocl 
t Kentucky the politicians and tbeolo- 

gians are white-washed. Af fV „ 

I had three different views on three different days of the 

XvmSe MohlntX and had its head all wrapped up in a 
&wMte turban of steam and its foot hare. There ^ some 
wears ago, a question of etiquette between a mountain and ^oltam 
Led as to which should go to the other when it was desirable that 
the two should meet in conference, but the mountain stood its 
the two °ulct me rdpos ition that Mohammed would 

fawet " a move 1 on himselfi\f the two ever came together ami 
T think that established a precedent that makes it more probable 
U fte Afohammedan learned to wrap up his head and go bare- 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 293 

fra f r sszs *Sf ^ : hat f + r mountain " 

was the day we ™d ed it and afll T ^ 1 8aW Ve ~ 
eould see of it in the moll Tt ^ l0ng ' from the first we 

much like Rip Van MnM«l'n 7? JUSt the same wa T~ 

did in the CaVsMlStainf ^ f ° ll0WerS ° f Hend ™ H ^n 

that float d off Tn ft t TusT^ XT* make a <^ d 
making a chain of eloud^tW / S hlgh as the mountain, 

two or three hundred M e« \ ? . ° readl aw * ° ff to Bome 

people who d7rt wfll do likl & 5 ^ rfV^ to Smoldn S « 
Vesnvins-get out of doors ™d U / 1S ° n ' S men ' and " ke 

do it. 01 b and §° awa y °«t in the mountains to 

Wowt^TinTo^eSlV 116 C r^ r ° f V ~ » dld ■* 
average Cookie ttlZtZ.tZ S^fZT "d 
sulphurous gases away from us loke and 

to a ^X^^bfiS of P that Came 't abOUt ^ 
with no additional expense to us Th O n , that mountain, where, 
gant lunch for us an a little d J ^hai [prepared an ele- 
finished, a large an ^ beanShotef Cffifr*" ^ ^ 
rocks, right on the side I •, ° f lava and volcanic 

built and in a ylar from tt t ° that is now be mg 

ready for al? tL^ year armm o, ™ T." that hotel & 
cars tuning r^ht to the doo^ bTnJ f With electric 

haye things fixed L all rl hTl + h J% pk llTe there shoidd 

Tiler, „„,. ,„„ j„, ont J "J; ,™ " " . »k.U *m, forjrt. 
o»t^^^ 

^rit a i^ 

shown that it [s not true that ^ h °" Se 3 ™ Mn wh ° has 
"A whistling woman and a crowing hen 
Never come to sny good end." 



294 DOG FENNEL IX THE OBIENT 

She was a Miss Voorheis, one of whose beautiful accomplish- 
ments was that she whistled as beautifully as a nightingale sings. 
She married Mr. Haggin. the copper king, who is worth %<>»,- 

000,000. . „„ , 

If you have read "Behind the Bars: 31498' you perhaps re- 
member how I failed to hear the nightingale in England, when 1 
wa= a young man. hut I hare heard many other fine singing birds, 
the finest and the most, including mocking birds and thrushes, 
and orioles and cat birds and James Lane Al en^s Kentucky 
Cardinals." at my own little home. "Qnakeracre," m "Dog .Fennel 
precinct: but I have never yet heard any bird music that equaled 
the whistling of that Italian that I heard at the half-way house 
o-oina- up Mount Vesuvius. All along up the mountain we won d 
Lp in the shade and rest our horses and gather beautiful wild 
flower* at the same time that we were looking at snow away oft on 
the top's of the Alps and Appennines that had lain on those moun- 
tains for ten thousand rears, and I thought ahout how Hanmbal. 
the black Booker T. Washington of his day, and Napoleon Bona- 
parte had with large armies "climbed over those mountains, of the 
stamge store of how Hannibal had gotten great barners of roek 
out of his war by building fires on them, and pouring vinegar on 
ttem while they were hot and of how Napoleon had dragged his 
a mon m r those snows and had gone with his army clear down 
Zto Egypt and at the foot of Cheops had said to his men The 
ere" of ti e world are upon you," and I thought wha silly create** 
ineriean men and women must he who waste their time and 
monev on the tinsel shows of Yankeedom when they could, jnst a, 
easily see all these wonderful things that we were seeing 

We got to the funicular railway that goes up for a thou and 
feet or more to within ahout 200 feet of the top of the mountain. 
That ra war goes up at an angle of about fifty-five degrees, and 
I : the most frightful looking ride I ever had. Between pnipmg 
down into the crater and being on one of those cars, it those w re 
rope hmild break, when near the top. the difference would hardly 
bTwori mentioning. These cars were limited to ^twelve person 
d a load hut in spite of the horrible danger of the place the 
glxardi had all they' could do to keep the Cookies from crowding 
them above their limit. 

Airs E M. Chase of Atlantic City. New Jersey, a pretty, 
blnshing'yonng widow and I rode on the last lower seat so that 
there was nothing, apparently, between us ami the abyss of t lou- 
i P- o "feet below. She made me promise to say m my hook 
Zt she and I rode side by side up that railway to the crater of 
Ye^iv ius or as near there as that railway went. I could not get 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 295 

her to look back below us and I didn't blame her, for only one or 
two glances of it were all that I wanted of it. I told her a funny 
story and she was generally kind enough to laugh at my storieJ 
but she was too badly scared to laugh ihat time, andYwas not 
fee mg m any shape to be very funny myself. I said to her as 
follows: -Once there was an old woman riding up one of tho'e 
inclined railroads in Cincinnati, and she asked a man sitting be ide 
her wha would become of her if a wire rope broke, and he told ner 

h cZ tZ t iY^ S that the ° ther r °P e hold 

of her if tl , d la i J r ant6d t0 kn ° W What would b ^ome 
ot her if the second rope broke, and the man told her that there 

was a paten automatic clutch that would hold the car if both ropes 

broke, and the old lady said: "But what would become of me if he 

clutch broke?- and the man said: "Well, madam, that would 

depend upon how you have lived." 

Mrs Chase did not laugh, and I did not blame her, for it was 
not much of a story any way, and was a mighty poor one to be 
telling a ady m any such a fix as we were in. When we got to the 
upper end of that funicular railway there was still about 250 feet 
to climb, and we could walk it on our own hook, or have three 
men to carry each of us up, or we could catch hold of the end of 
a strap and a man would greatly assist us in walking: one man to 
each All cost money except the independent walk and so I started 
out to walk as did the majority of the party. 

Weaver had drawn the line at that funicular railroad and 
stopped at its foot and waited, but climbing up that last hard 
stretch one of his rich widow "girls » a New York woman, told me 
that if she could find another man like the husband she had had 
she would be glad to have another one. 0, no; she knew I was 
married. She was a good Catholic and is the same woman that 
went up against the faro bank at Monte Carlo. She was not afraid 
of a faro bank and she was not afraid to marry another man like 
one she had tried, and that woman was not afraid of the devil— for 
she was a good Catholic— and it was because that woman was not 
alraid ot that volcano that some of the balance of us got to look down 
m the crater. Her name was Evan or McCartv, I forget which, 
but its all the same, as they both wanted to get married and each 
had money enough to support a husband. So I will call her Mrs 
McKyan. That climb from the end of the railroad up to the top 
ol the mountain was one of the hardest jobs I have had in many 
a day. The stuff we walked in was neither ashes, sand nor soil but 
was something black almost as soft as flour, and we would sink into 
it over our shoe tops each step. I followed right behind Mrs. McRvan 
and about the time I would break down and make up my mind 



296 



DOG FENNEL iiST THE ORIENT 



to throw up the sponge and give it up and say I could go no higher 
and my old heart was thumping away like the devil beating tan- 
bark, Mrs. McRvan would break down too and we would all lie in 
that soft stuff until we could get a little more breath and then try 
it again. I can't remember whether or not Mrs. Chase ever got 
any further than the top of the funicular railway, but it seems to 
me that after we had stayed up there as long as we wanted and 
started down, I met Mrs. Chase still chasing herself nearly 
up to the top, red in the face and nearly dropping at each step, 
and I know that a lot of them did not get back to the Moltke until 
away after night, 

A day or'so before I got to this place in my book I got a letter 
from Mrs] Ada L. Pratt of Boston, inclosing some pictures of us on 
the top of Vesuvius. One is a picture of me sitting on the rocks 
on top of Vesuvius, with my hat off and blowing for dear life, and 
another is a party in which are Mrs. Me Ryan and Rev. Marshall, 
and Bliss, the millionaire Boston shoe man, and one of those Italian 
policemen that all look like Napoleon Bonaparte and all dress like 
him, and a guide and I. Mrs. Pratt was in good shape to take 
pictures because what money she didn't have Bliss did have and 
those two rode up that last stretch on the backs of three men each. 
Bliss and Weaver and I all stayed in one big room with smaller 
room attachments in Cairo, and one night somebody stole Bliss' 
very expensive watch. I laid it on Weaver and Weaver said Bliss 
never had any watch and Bliss never got it. 

After we got clean up to the level of the crater we were about 
fifty feet from the edge of the crater and there was a valley about 
fifteen feet deep, between us and the edge of the crater. My sister 
had told me that when she was there about fifteen years ago her two 
young daughters had ruined their shoes by burning them on the 
hot rocks. * When we were halted fifty yards from the crater the 
gravel, two inches down, was hot enough to burn shoes,' but was not 
hot enough on top, and I did not have but one pair of shoes. 

Mrs. McRvan said to the guides that she wanted to go across 
that valley and look down in that crater and the guide told her 
that it would not do to think of it, and pointed to the rocks down 
in the valley and said they were hot and that some of them had 
fallen there 'not more than fifteen minutes before we got up there, 
and I thought he was lying and I joined Sister McRvan and said I 
wanted to go, too, and I thought about the elder Pliny who, m 
A. D. 79, lost his life in looking at that old mountain, and I knew 
if I did the same thing there would be those who had read what I 
had written about the elder Pliny at different times in connec- 
tion with the earthquake that is said to have occurred at the cruci- 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIENT 



297 



fixion of Jesus and which Pliny strangely omitted to mention if 
that earthquake occurred at the time, and I knew if I got killed 
there would he some thousands of people who would say that I 
died a martyr to science like the elder Pliny had done, and I 
got so wrought up over the idea that I was not one-tenth' part as 
much afraid of falling into that crater as I was of going up that 
funicular railroad, and I believe that Pliny would have climbed the 
whole business before he would have gone up that funicular rail- 
road if the Cooks had given him a round trip ticket. 

Mrs. McEyan begged so to be allowed to go over there and I 
joined her, telling the guide that I had been wanting to look down 
into that hole for more than fifty years and had spent all my 
money and traveled over 13,000 miles to do it, and sure enough, 
while we were arguing it, for it didn't take more than three or four 
minutes, for some times when I turn my tongue loose at both ends 
I can talk as fast as any woman — sure enough the old mountain 
shot off its mouth to advise us" about it, and it sent up a puff of 
steam and smoke about as big as a thousand big hay stacks, and the 
rocks flew up like there were about a million Catholic Irish down 
there in hell blasting on a railroad. We could not see the biggest 
ones, for they were in the smoke and steam, but a lot of them about 
as big as my fist went as high as Gilroy/s kite, but they all fell the 
opposite direction from us. The head guide said if we would wait 
a minute he would go and see the head policeman in charge of the 
fireworks department of that plant, and" that he himself would be 
willing to o-uide us if the head police officer would take the respon- 
sibility. No sooner had that head guide got fairlv started for that 
bend Bonaparte-looking policeman" than' Sister McEvan wheeled 
and made a break for the crater. She was lust as dead stuck on 
that crater as you ever saw any Irishman stuck on the "crater," and 
the way she struck out for that crater was a caution. The rocks 
were so hot that I had to keep tramping to keep from burning my 
shoes and Sister McEyan didn't care a durn if she did burn hers. 
She had not only shoes to burn, but money to burn, and she had 
a burning desire to look down that crater' and it did look like a 
burning shame that she could not do it, and if those rocks had 
been as hot and soft as they had been not long before that, Bro. 
Sweeny might have seen some tracks in the rock that were better 
authenticated than that one he saw on Mount of Olives. 

Sister McEyan ran for the crater and got a start before the 
guards saw her. It was an awful looking place for a foot-race. 
I had only two seconds to make up my mind, and I saw the guards 
were going to catch her, and while the guards were occupied with 
her I lit out for the crater by a little shorter route, but before I 



298 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OBIEXT 



was more than half way there one nabbed me and they came waltz- 
ing Sister McByan and me back up on top the places we had 
started from just as the head man of the police got there. I knew 
they didn't care whether an old rural rooster like me fell down 
the crater or not, except that the guard didn't want to lose his job 
by letting- me do it. but that head policeman could not help 
smile in the Italian language when he saw the guards leading that 
woman back, and just about that time the Irish in hell touched off 
another dynamite blast — I wish they had that Chicago dynamite 
fellow down there with them- — and a lot more of steam and rocks 
went skyward, but Sister McByan stood with her back to it and 
didn't even look around, but I watched out to see if any of them 
were coming back my way. That policeman was one of the hand- 
somest and most gallant fellows you ever saw, and he looked for 
all the world just like old Bonaparte on the top of that column in 
Paris that he made out of bronze cannon that he took away from 
the Austrians. As soon as the widow put her eyes on him I saw 
it was another case of Anthony and Cleopatra that we had been 
seeing about down in Egypt and reading about in Shakespeare and 
hearing about in that Yankee General's song, "I Am Dying, Egypt, 
dying," and I thought about old Welter's saying, "Bevare of vid- 
ders, Samivel," and I saw that Vesuvius Bonaparte, just melting 
under that "ridder's" eyes, like those rocks had once melted under 
the fires of that volcano, and he agreed that we might go if we 
would let the guides hold of each of us as we looked down the crater 
and we said if was a go, and we started, only two or three at a time, 
and Mr. C. T. Aldrich, of Worcester, Massachusetts, who had to 
use a crutch, the man who had the pretty Campbellite wife, was 
one of the first three to start, Sister McEyan and I being the 
other two. I remember now that Mrs. Chase came up to that place 
where the police were willing for us to go, but would not go over 
to the crater. It took three guards to hold the woman— didn't fool 
me worth a cent— and nobody held me. I got up within four 
feet of the edge of the thing and stuck one leg back as far as I 
could and peeped over there about one-half a minute. A little of 
that went a long way— 13,000 miles— with me. I am glad I saw 
down in there, for it made me think that I ought to try to be a 
better man, but I don't want any more of it in mine. It was GOO 
feet across that hole in the ground and it was just like looking 
down into hell. 

Ingersoll said the society in hell was good but the climate 
was bad, and from that sample it seemed that he was right about 
the climate. I could not see any fire down in the crater. If it 
had been night I suppose I might have seen fire or red hot stones, 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OKIENT 



299 



but in the bright sunlight I could see none. We would wait until 
there had been an explosion that threw out the rocks and then run 
and peep into the crater as long as we could, so as to get away 
before the next explosion. I think I saw a half dozen explosions. 
I could not see down into the crater more than fifty feet before 
the smoke would obscure the view, so that I never saw to the bot- 
tom. All the inside of the crater was filled with a fine powder 
that sloped, in a funnel shape, down at an angle that seemed like 
it would come to a point about a hundred feet down. There was 
very little noise accompanying the explosions that threw out the 
rocks. All of the rocks that I could see were those that went above 
the puffs of steam and smoke, and I suppose I could only see each 
time about a half bushel. 

There is only one point at which people come up to the crater. 
If the wind is blowing toward that point the odor of sulphur and 
brimstone from the crater is so suffocating that people cannot stand 
it, but when we were there the wind was directly away from that 
point and I could not smell the brimstone at all. The smell of 
burning sulphur or brimstone is very offensive to me, and on that 
account, if nothing else, I want to see if I cannot be a better man. 
I saw various patches of sulphur on the sides of the mountain. 

In the first descriptions of Vesuvius that I ever read, they 
told of a fissure in the mountain near the crater that was called, 
in Italian, of v course, the "grotto of the dog," because a common 
exhibition that the guides gave was to tie a rope around a dog and 
lower him into that fissure for a minute, when the dog would 
become so asphyxiated that he would barely recover when drawn 
into the pure air. I used to wonder, as a boy, that anybody would 
be so brutal as to pay the guide to witness such a spectacle, or even 
to allow it. But no such place is seen or heard of there now. It 
has probably been filled with lava or ashes, and the sentiment 
there now and of the people who visit there now would not allow 
such a thing. Even when I used to hear of it I think it is probable 
that the fissure was there by that name, and that it was a tradition 
that it got its name, because the suffocating of a dog, or dogs, 
had occurred here, accidentally or purposely, in old times. Neither 
in Spain nor in Italy did we see or hear anything about bull- 
fighting, and I think the days of that brutality are now about 
numbered. I saw many signs upon buildings in several of the 
countries that we visited, indicating them to be the headquarters 
of "Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals." I did 
not, however, see any societies for the prevention of cruelty to men 
and women in Avar, and I think it possible that murdering bulls 
has ceased to be interesting because the Christian murdering of 



300 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIEXT 



men. women and children in China and the Philippines and in 
Russia is so much more exciting. 

Mount Vesuvius is. today, a religions power in the world that 
beats Calvary and Olivet and Sinai all combined. The ancient 
heathen and all the writers of the Xew Testament and Jesus Christ 
all believed that the world was flat and that heaven was above it 
and hell beneath it. The Xew Testament describes hell as a deep 
pit where fire and brimstone burn forever and from which the 
smoke arises forever. Christianity got its hold in Rome, and the 
Roman Catholic religion is, to-day, the greatest power on earth, 
because the priests in Italy could show the ignorant masses the 
volcano of Vesuvius, while Aetna and Stromboli were near by, and 
get money from the people by telling them that that volcano was 
the opening to hell, and that people would go to hell if they did 
not pay the priests and believe in the Christian religion. 

Sweeny told me that he believed there was a hell, and said 
he was willing to go there if he did not do right, and his highest 
ideal of right is to do what the Catholic Church tells him to do. 
Leo and the Vatican and St. Peter's are all in Rome now because 
Vesuvius is at Xaples. I did not stay upon the top of Vesuvius 
more than an hour and a half, but as an eye-opener for the won- 
ders of the world that hour and a half was the greatest I ever 
experienced. Then we had to go down that funicular railroad 
again and going down was still more frightful than going up, 
because in going down your face is turned so as to see the awful 
abyss below you. We would be going down a grade that was 
frightfully steep and right ahead of us it would look like the rail- 
road just stopped in mid-air and that there was the jumping off 
place, and when we would get to that we would see that the road 
had just started down a still steeper grade. Of course I reasoned 
that thousands and thousands of people had gone up and down 
that track and that I had never heard of any accident there, and 
I knew that the owners of that road, simply 'as a financial consid- 
eration, if nothing more, could not afford to let one of those cars 
get away on that mountain for $1,000,000, because they would lose 
more than that in the patronage of the road, but it took all of that 
to steady my nerves and I have voluntarily gone into a lot of places 
where no coward would want to go. 

We got to our carriages at the foot of the funicular railway 
and Ave started down. AVeaver and "the girls" were in the carriage 
with its top back, and of course we went down faster than we came 
up. When we had gone a mile or two I saw that the driver was 
asleep and so reported to the people behind me. and I saw how it 
was that that carriage went over that bank as we were going from 



DOG- FENNEL IX THE OEIEXT 301 

Jerusalem down to Jericho. I felt so sorry for the poor tired 
driver that I did not wake him, but I kept my eyes on the lines 
that he held m his hands. 

The beggars knew that the carriages came down the mountain 
taster than they went up and there were not so many beggars that 
were old men and women and that had no legs or no eyes, and so 
only the best runners among the beggars were on duty. Finally 
we came to a place where there were seven boys about an average 
ol twelve years. They had found out from generations of experi- 
ence that people would not throw money to big people as freely as 
to little ones, and also that if they were too little they could not 
run fast enough and stand the racket. Our driver was wide awake 
before he came to that pack of boys, and cracked his whip as if he 
wanted to rush by them as fast as possible. They all knew my gray 
hair and beard and were ready for us, and met us with as much 
Italian clamor as if they thought we understood it all The seven 
boys commenced to run beside the carriage and would not only 
keep up with it, but would jump up and turn somersaults and light 
on their feet and keep on. Weaver would throw money to the boy 
that turned the somersault and soon all of them got at it There 
was one boy considerably smaller than the others and Weaver would 
throw the money mostly to him and the big boys would run over 
him and made the little fellow cry lustily, but he never quit run- 
ning. It was pretty good fun just to see those boys, but when they 
had all run about a half mile there was a new element in the race 
m the shape of two girls, one about fourteen years old and a little 
one. The big girl was the. fastest thing in the lot and was a little 
fresher than the boys. The big girl was built from the ground up 
From years of framing of her ancestry and herself, she had limbs 
that were developed for running like those of a Kentucky race 
horse. I know what I am talking about, because where I live you 
can see race horses any day. That girl had had a thousand foot- 
races with those boys, or some others just like them, before, and 
she knew her business. There was not a shoe or stocking in the 
whole nine. When they had run about a hundred yards that girl 
made what the race horse men call a spurt and shot out twenty 
yards ahead of the carriage. When she was running at full speed 
her head went down like a duck's, she gathered her skirts— perhaps 
it would be more accurate to say her skirt— between her knees and 
without losing any of the impetus of the run, over she went in a 
somersault, just as gracefully as a butterfly or circus woman. Then 
she fell back into line and Weaver threw her some money; there 
was a regular foot-ball rush to take the money on the fly and 
then a scramble on the ground, but we could not see who got it. 



302 



DOG EEXXEL IX THE OKIEXT 



I saw that the little girl was fixing for a somersault, but the poor 
little thing could not get far enough ahead in the race to tuck her 
skirt between her knees, and. in this regard, the boys had the advan- 
tage of the girls, and it shows what I have always said, that all 
women should quit skirts and get into big-legged trousers like some 
of those pretty Mohammedan women. Christian womens' dress 
is long below and short above, and Mohammedan women are th 1 
opposite. 

George D. Prentice's apology for low-necked dresses was th*t 
he didn't get to see the ladies often and when he did he wanted 
to see as much of them as possible, and the only good thing that 
Sam Jones ever said was when he was asked if the ladies at a 
big dinner where he was were in full dress. He said he did not 
know : that he had not looked under the table to see. There seems 
to have been nothing above the table to suggest that they were 
dressed at all. I am not kicking about low-necked dresses; the 
onlv kick coining to me is about having the skirt too long. 

When the little girl had gained enough on the others, as she 
thought, to venture on a somersault she ducked her head and her 
little hands and skirt were on their way to her knees when a big- 
fellow ran up against her and the poor little thing went sprawling 
on the ground and the others ran over her. The little one got up 
crying pitifully, and the tears running down like a young Mobe, 
or one of that pile of crocodiles that we saw on the street in Cairo. 
That little girl knew that that was her opportunity and the more 
she cried the more money Weaver threw to her. but only a small 
part of which she got. The big girl was leading the field in the 
race, and her long", heavy Italian hair streamed back like in a 
picture of Diana running a deer, and she was getting the biggest 
share of the swag. A fellow behind her caught her hair and gave 
her a jerk that almost threw her down. She could not see which 
one had pulled her hair, and I think it possible that she picked the 
wrong fellow, for they were all running a neck-and-neck race. 
But that girl wheeled around and she threw her arm around the 
neck of a big fellow that was next behind her, and the muscles 
in her bare arms looked, for all the world, like the arms of Creek 
and Roman athletes that we saw in the statuary and the Arabs we 
saw in actual life, and the way she held that boy's head under her 
left arm and thumped him in the face with her right fist made me 
laugh then until I almost fell off the high carriage seat and is 
the onlv thing that I saw in my Oriental tour that I cannot think 
about now without laughing. 

There is a great rage among the Yanks for female gymnastics. 
If some of those women will send over to that place and hire that 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIENT 



303 



girl and bring her over here, and put her at the head of a school 
of physical training and pay her $1,000 a year, she will give them 
some pointers in that line that they had not heard of. That party 
followed that carriage for three miles and never let up until Wea- 
ver had thrown them all the change that he and "the girls- could 
rai.e. When we got clown to the bottom of the mountain" we met 
a strange-looking funeral procession. All of them were dressed 
m long white robes, and had white sacks over their heads with 
holes for their eyes and noses, and they looked like a gang of ghosts. 
I could not tell whether they were men or women, or both 

On March 27th we went by rail to Rome, 154 miles distant. 
The country is nearly all in beautiful plains. There are many 
houses made of straw. Much of the country produces grapes 
Nearly al of the fields have rows of tall trees through themfabo" 
a hundred feet apart. M ires are fastened on these trees as high 
up as twenty-five feet and the vines run along these wire* The 
ground is also cultivated in other crops. A striking feature is the 
plowing with oxen, all of which are white. They are placed sino-le 
and m pairs, and I saw six oxen pulling one plow, three oxen work- 
ing abreast. There are pine trees in one shape all over the country 
and m the towns. They all have straight bodies and are trimmed 
up almost to the top so that they look like palm trees or umbrellas 
there are castles up on the hills, and oranges growing in great 
abundance everywhere. There seems to be no irrigation ancl not 
many streams. The only mode of separating the lands of different 
owners is by corner stones. The soil is very rich and the cultiva- 
tion is very fine. The trains were verv fine, ancl there were only 
three persons m the coach that I occupied. Some distance from 
the roads were mountains with olive trees on their sides. I noticed 
all along the road a peculiarity about the stone walls of all kinds ■ 
it was that the holes were always left in them where one end of 
the beams that hold the scaffolds had gone in the wall and these 
had been taken clown without stopping up the holes. I saw this in 
so many countries that it was phenomenal to me. When walls 
were built up against banks some Cookies said the holes were left 
for water to run through, and others said thev were left for the 
birds to make nests in. Both of these theories are unreasonable. 

On the railways there were great tank cars, such as we see in 
America for coal oil, which were used there for hauling wine. 
There were beautiful macadamized roads. There were as many 
women working in the fields as there were men, and they were 
doing men's work, but it did not seem to be hard to them. The 
women were strong ancl healthy looking and happy looking, and 
were all neatly dressed, gay colored garments prevailing. I had 



304 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIEXT 



heard much, about the women working in the fields in Europe, and 
I had heard that fact urged as an evidence of the superiority of our 
American conditions that our American women do not have to 
work in the fields. I am a "woman's rights" man. I do not know 
the extent of the education of these Italian women, but in many 
respects they have great advantages over the society women of 
our country, or over the laboring women of our country. The 
health and strength and fresh open air that all of these women had, 
gave them advantages over our society women, or over our shop 
women, or our farmers' wives. 

Then we saw deep snows upon the mountains while it was 
delightfully warm down in the plains. There were many good 
stone houses of great permanency. I saw a drove of about 300 
cattle on one pasture, all black and all splendidly fat, Some of 
these houses seemed to me hundreds of years , old, and in perfect 
preservation. They were all so built of stone, with tile roofs, that 
there seemed to be no repairs necessary and no danger from fire. 
All the coal in the country is coal dust pressed into solid blocks 
of uniform size and it is more convenient for handling than ours 
in America. These blocks are about twelve inches by five by four, 
and are stacked up like brick. The plows have only one handle 
and the plowman walks on the side of that handle. The Alps look 
somewhat like the mountains around Jerusalem. Trees are trim- 
med and the brush cut into lengths of about three feet, and this 
wood thus cut is all straightened in bundles and stacked away up 
in trees. These trees in which this wood is thus kept and used 
only when perfectly seasoned, have branches that go out about ten 
feet from the ground in such a way that it is easy to stack wood 
in them. In some instances the wood in these trees is so arranged 
that the top forms a roof for the balance and wood seems to have 
kept in some of them, in perfect order, for years. There are houses 
cut out of the stone in the hills. In some places there are tracts 
of land that are not so good for cultivating that are used to pro- 
duce wood. It is a peculiar kind of a tree that comes out of the 
ground in bunches of twenty-five or fifty stalks about three inches 
in diameter at the ground and grows up twenty-five feet high and 
seems to attain that growth in probably only three or four years. 
It is then cut down and seems all to' come again from the root 
almost indefinitely. The poles that thus grow are round and hard 
and without any limbs or leaves except at the top. 

We came along the Appian Way and saw the tombs of Eomu- 
lus and Eemus and the place where Paul stopped on his way to 
Eome. When we got within twelve miles of Eome we came to the 
acqueducts that were built when Eome was in its ancient glory. 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



305 



They are among the wonders of the world. An angel came to a 
shepherd and told him where was a great spring to get water for 
the city, and the shepherd reported it to the city. These acqueducts 
are, in some places, about a hundred feet high. They are all built 
upon arches from end to end. Sometimes there is only one arch ; 
sometimes one arch on the top of another, and sometimes one arch 
and one on top of it, and then a third one on top of that. At 
some ancient time some of the original aqueduct has been taken 
down to built a lower aqueduct. For miles before we got to Rome 
we could see the dome of St. Peter. 

As 1 saw the aqueducts and the Appian Way and the railroad, 
each with its history all going to Rome, there came to mind the 
• saying : "All roads lead to Rome," and "Rome was not built in a 
day/' and then, "In Rome do as Romans do," and "Make Rome 
howl;" then Blanchard's illustrious "Rum, Romanism and 
Rebellion,," and then, "Rome or Reason," and I believe that this 
last, "Rome or Reason," will, before long, be the slogan of conflict, 
intellectual certainly, and physical possibly, that will decide 
whether supernaturalism or naturalism, ir rationalism or rational- 
ism, faith or science shall dominate what is now Christendom. 
Theologically, it is true that all roads, wherever Roman Catholicism 
has any footing, lead to Rome. Greek Catholicism is a "sick man." 
Protestantism is so divided that any one of its sects would rather 
see Roman Catholicism triumph than see any other Protestant sect 
do so. Roman Catholicism, it is true, has received a check in Italy, 
its own home, but the Pope has skillfully played the game of being 
"a prisoner in the Vatican," and while rolling in the greatest 
luxury and wealth, has gained from his adherents the crown of 
martyrdom, and the Roman Catholic church, to-day, with a presi- 
dent of the United States pandering to it for political influence, 
and with every Protestant preacher of any standing in the United 
States so intimidated that he dare not speak against it, is growing 
in power every day, and it grows on what it takes away from 
Protestantism as a big pig knocks away the little one and gets the 
portion of both. But the hatred between Catholicism and Protest- 
antism is such that either would rather see Infidelity succeed than 
to have its old enemy do so, and when Romanism gets so strong in 
America that Protestantism will see that the struggle for supremacy 
in American politics is between Rome and reason the whole Protest- 
ant world and all of Judaism will be combined against Rome, and 
they will "make Rome howl" like a whipped cur. On the Moltke 
either a Prostestant or a Catholic was ready and glad any time to 
discuss religion with me, but neither of these ever mentioned the 
subject to the other. 



30G 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



A few years ago Rome was not a clean city and "Rome fever" 
was something I had always associated with the place and knew 
that all visitors there feared. It happens, however, that having 
been in Rome, I never once thought of the words, "Rome fever," 
until I came to this place in writing this book. It used to be quite 
fashionable to go to Rome and die with "Rome fever." The proverb 
was "See Naples and die," but they went from Naples and died 
in Rome. 

There is certainly nothing about Rome now that indicates 
imperfect sanitation. It is probably the cleanest city in the world ; 
is one of the most beautiful cities in the world and is the city of 
greatest historical interest in the world. 

We were not to take any carriage drive with the guides until 
the day after our arrival at Rome, but I had a thousand times 
wondered if I would ever get to see the Coliseum at Rome and as 
soon as we could get our lunch at our hotel, old "Arkansaw" and 
I struck out on foot to find it. We got the general direction to the 
place. It was probably two miles off. The streets ran in many 
curious ways and it was hard to get where we were going, but 
occasionally we would manage to make somebody understand where 
we wanted to go, and managed to keep on the right road. We 
found that if all roads did lead to . Rome, all roads in Rome 
did not lead to the Coliseum. The houses and grounds and streets 
and beautiful uniforms on men and the elegant dresses and equip- 
pages of ladies and the strange things in the shops were all of 
great interest, but any time in the midst of all this modern beauty 
we were liable to run up on wonderful ancient ruins. These ruins 
are now being preserved from any further vandalism and are justly 
recognized as the most wonderful features of this wonderful city, 
and as the feature of interest that brings the greatest revenue to 
the city, by bringing visitors there from all over the world. 

One disgusting piece of vandalism has been practiced by the 
Catholic Church and looks like the caricature of some newspaper 
cartoonist. The statues of Roman Emperors or Roman gods on 
the tops of many of the ancient columns standing there, have been 
changed into Catholic saints that have hoops around their heads, 
apparently suspended in the air, as those things are wont to do 
in the cases of real saints, when viewed from the front, but which 
hoops from rear views of these old fellows are seen to be sustained 
by iron rods running clown the backs of their necks and into their 
marble or bronze togas. Altogether it makes a pretty good alle- 
gorical teaching that saints are to be regarded in the light that 
they present themselves to the public and that you must not go 
behind this public presentation to find out how their glories are 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OEIENT 



307 



sustained. "No man is a hero to his valet/' is a saying of special 
force when applied to saints. 

We came suddenly upon a great open square and I recognized 
at once, from the pictures, the column of Trajan, but I had never 
heard of this desecration of the living pages of History by sticking 
the hoop of the Catholic saint around the head of the Roman 
Emperor, and I must say that I felt the deepest disgust for the 
sentiment that made such an anachronistic caricature. This was 
erected in A. D. 114. Around this column in sculpture from bot- 
tom to top were told the achievements of ancient Eome and her 
rulers, and around it lay the remains of a temple to some Roman 
god— broken columns six feet in diameter and capitals and friezes 
and broken sculptures and pieces of great tablets on which, in 
ancient Roman letters, were told the histories of thousands of years 
ago. All of these have been exhumed from the rubbish and soil of 
ages and are now down below the present level of the city about 
ten feet, and all protected by a wall built up to the present level 
of the city with an iron railing around the top. It is a singular 
fact that the bottoms of nearly all the ruins of ancient Rome that 
are in the valleys, and frequently those on the levels are ten or 
twelve feet below the present level of the city. They are all pre- 
served, though, now so that they seem secure for as many years to 
come as they have already seen. 

_ Then, after passing some wonderful fountains, we came to the 
Coliseum. One of these fountains has a wonderful aggregation of 
colossal sea horses with webbed feet and fish tails, and tritons and 
nymphs and mermaids, all blowing up water at a rate that seemed 
like they did not care for expenses. Finally we saw, about a half 
mile ahead of us, what I recognized as the Coliseum. I had pre- 
pared myself, as far as I could, for something wonderful, and I 
recollected that my experience at the pyramids was that the reality 
- surpasssed any imagination of any human being that had never 
seen them; and yet when, finally, the Coliseum burst upon my 
view I stood almost transfixed and paralyzed with wonder, and 
could but exhaust my vocabulary of adjectives of admiration in 
looking at the place. Rome is incomparably the greatest museum 
in the word— it has 500,000 people— but if you have to miss the 
Coliseum or the balance of Rome, let the balance all go, and then 
stand and gaze at the Coliseum from its outside and then go inside 
and climb its five stories of seats, and wander around through its 
mazes and, literally and metaphorically, get lost in its wonders and 
then go and look at the dens for wild beasts and gladiators and 
see where they came out and fought to the death to amuse the 
100,000 people, all of them with abundance of room to sit and to 



308 



DOG FENXEL IN THE ORIENT 



walk, that once gathered at that place. The walls, with people 
clear up to the top, are 157 feet high, and the stage upon which 
the actors came is 278 feet by 177. There are the places where 
the royalty of Eome sat, and before whom all the actors went and 
made their bow and said : "We who are about to die salute yon," 
and then turned and fought with beasts or with each other, until 
the managers of the entertainment called a halt for a few minutes 
until the "supes" could run and throw sand in the blood, so that 
men and beasts should not be put to any disadvantage by slipping 
in their own blood. Just see how just and generous and fair the 
managers of that popular amusement were. The leaders of the 
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals were there, in 
full force, to see that no man who was artificially armed with a 
sword and shield should take any advantage of the poor lion who 
had nothing but his teeth and claws with which to defend him- 
self Grand old Pagan religionists were the men and women 
of those good old days of fair play for all. That grand old religion 
is gone and Christianity has come in its stead and the cowardly, 
white-livered sneak of to-day amuses the Christian descendants of 
those aid Pagan religionists and gains the shouts and applause of 
the most devout Christian men and women in the whole world, 
by penning up a poor bull and horses together and sticking barbed 
arrows into the bull until, in his rage' of pain, he tears the bowels 
out of the poor, defenseless horses while those cowardly Christian 
descendants of Pagan sires scamper to places of safety without a 
scratch in their rotten Christian hides. 

Voltaire said of Jesus Christ, as I understand it : "Ecresez 
rinfame"— damn the wretch. I do not say that; I am not 
ashamed to say that the tears came into my eyes as I walked alone 
upon Calvarv.' and I think it possible that Infidelity is doing injus- 
tice to a young Jew, who. like modern Infidels, had become dis- 
gusted with priestcraft, and had the courage to blast them as they 
deserve, but I do say damn to the lowest depths of molten hell under 
Vesuvius, the infernal fraud of to-day; the two-headed dragon, 
Christianity, one of the heads being the Pope at Rome and the 
other head the Patriarch of the Greek Church at Jerusalem, the 
two wiggling a little tail, the joint property of the two, made of 
such Protestants as Roosevelt and Edward VII. 

I had read "Quo Vadis*' with great interest, and all my lite 
had heard and believed that on this arena in the Coliseum the 
Romans had burned the Christians "to light a Roman feast," and 
had here thrown beautiful and lovely Christian women to lions 
and tigers, and had, for the amusement of the people of that place, 
subjected those women to all sorts of disgrace and contempt, 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



309 



exposing them naked to be hooted at by the "gallery gods " simnlv 
because they believed in Jesus Christ/ It had alwajf onndeT o 

Z, t I ' , ;r ll! V,' ' 1, '-' m, ' U ' t0 make the ™ rld Relieve that O ris- 
tiamty IS better than Pagamsm, and I heard that Christian lie 
muled by the behest Christian authority in the world on that very 

fy^rT Vt \T am °° g th0Se ll0D denS ' "«b- two days after- 
ward. I forget the man's name, but on the third day of our stay 
m Rome he took too much of our time in lecturing to us about 
the wonderful places we were seeing. He is a voluminous writer on 

woXl^V man Wh0m > of a11 '»-" S the 

world, llfi Cookies, including nineteen clergymen, and the mil- 

honaire Cooks themselves had selected as thehighe'st authority to 

"Onn V 7" 86 F T i Th3t man Eluded to the stories of 
Ouo Vadis as unfounded, and said to us, all listening most 

in nt Lt°« * at he T\ that there was no truth in ^S: 

ment that the Romans had ever persecuted any Christians in the 
Coliseum, and he pointed oyer toward St. Peter's and said that all 
the persecutions of the Christians that had ever been done at Rome 
was where that Egyptia.i monolith with the hieroglyphic inscrip- 
tions stands m that grea; circle in front of Si Peter'. 

know S ^tr Y and , Cath0liC Church and the P °P e a «t the guides 
know nothing about any persecutions of the Christians in front 
ol fc>t Peters except in such cases as that in which Christians 

he fold th™ If* ?T br i? CT Christian ,! ™»» S 

he told them tha the world was round and thus denied the state- 
ments of the Bible that it was flat. I never heard, in all my life 

anri uitie? t, t fr ° m ^ that highest authorit ? - ^» 

antiqmt.es that any Christians had been burnt in front 

of St Peters and just as "murder will out," 'it is now 

being developed that that whole story of the persecution of the 

and PonTs of t T* ' i * ChriStian ^ inw,,twl b y the priests ' 
and Popes of Rome to make money, and it naturally suggests to 
any competent judge of such matters that in the same wav and 
for the same purpose of making money, the priests and patriarchs 
at Jerusalem invented the lie that the Romans crucified Jesus for 
his religious opinions, on Calvary, or anywhere else 

; E /ght along with the temples of the Roman Pagans at Rome 
and along, neighbors to the Coliseum, are the ruins of the halls' 
and forums m which were made by these Pagan Romans the laws 

lovU^It ? ^ r rk i tak6S t0 - da y as the taxation of all 
government, only vitiated and perverted when an old Christian fool 
like Blaekstone mixes with those great laws the laws for burnino- 
witches, and for which he accurately quotes his authority from the 
.Bible, and it is immensely more probable that Lexington will yet 



310 DOG fENNKli JN THE ORIENT 

crucify or hang me, for mv religious opinions than that the Soman 
government in the halcyon days of its Paganism ever crucified, or 
allowed to be crucified, any man for what he believed about reli- 
gion. But if Jesus was really scheming to get possession of the 
throne of Judea, as very much that is said in the New Testament 
indicates, and thus became a dangerous citizen to the country and 
the government, it is possible that a man like Pilate who was 
trying to do for the best and so separated from his head govern- 
ment at Rome that he could only get instructions at long intervals, 
mav have "washed his hands" of any responsibility ior the results 
and have given Jesus to the Jews to be dealt with according to 
?he brutal laws of the Jewish Bible, with the result that priests of 
Jerusalem killed him, just as the prieste of Jerusalem or the 
Priests of Pome, led by the Patriarch and the Pope respectively, 
S to-dav murder any such man as Jesus Christ, if such a one 
should come along again, did not the Infidel Mohammedan ho d 
down the Patriarch and the Infidelity in Protestantism and m 
enlightened Judaism and in the sentiment that Garibaldi and 
others have inaugurated in Italy, held down the Pope. 

Rev Marshall, the highest exponent of Protestantism on the 
Moltke. told me that he did not believe most of the alleged miracles 
of he New Testament, and instanced that Jesus' walking on the 
wato could be accounted for on natural principles. I introduced 
Marshall to Harrison, supposing they would be eongen^neg, 
but thev were not congenial and as soon as I left Marsha 1 lelt, 
because WhaU did not believe in Jonah and the whale an Ha - 
rison did. Marshall started life as a common sailor and quit it 
and made as he told me. such a fortune at preaching that now, 
hou h he could endure all the fatigues of our tour and make 
fanev sermons and off-hand funny talks, on the Molt ke, he wa 
on the "superannuated list" and was going to spend the balance of 
Ms days having a good time spending his money. But he explained 
to me that he had handed over his preaching job to his son to 
make a fortune, too. as the father had done, and of course Mar- 
shall is not going to tell anything about what he saw m the Orient 
that will damage his son's job. I would love to see either Mar- 
halo Sween/at my house! to-day, but if I were only to have on 
of them 1 would rather have Sweeny, the ignorant dupe of those 
who lead him by the nose, than to have the bright and witty and 
teteCnt Marshall, who has gotten rich on making dupes of 
others and will now "keep hands off"' that his son may have a 
chance to play the same game that the daddy did .. , ; 

Marshall was the first man on the Moltke who subscribed for 
this book, and Sweeny subscribed for it himself and got more sub- 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OK1EXT 311 

scribers for it than anybody on the boat, and I could have no 
prejudice between them. But as between the honest ignorance that 
a man like Sweeny was born with, and that was cultivated in him 
by heredity and environment, on the one hand, and the intelligent 
connivance at the propagation of a lie for money, as Marshall does 
my heart and hand go to Sweeny. 

I measured some of the stones in the Coliseum. They were 
seven feet and four inches by four feet by three feet. That is the 
only building in the world that.it will do to rank with the pyra- 
mid of Cheops. The history of one is as interesting as the other 
Cheops is simply the triumph of brute force; the Coliseum is the 
combined triumph of brute force and of art. Cheops is two or 
three times as old as the Coliseum, and all the stone and brick 
m the Coliseum would not be enough to build the first fifteen feet 
01 Lneops. The men who built the water-works of Xew York City 
could bring all the water to Eome from that twelve miles away 
by pipes before the people of that day could have built one of the 
thousands of arches in Home's ancient aqueduct, and so science 
strides. For years the Coliseum was used as a quarry from which 
to get stone for building and marble, for making lime. About one 
halt oi that mam outer wall has thus been consumed and at other 
parts nearly all of the building has been removed. One of the 
Popes stopped the destruction of this building. I suppose some 
other Popes have done some good, but that happens to be the only 
good thing that I ever hard of any Pope doing. 

On one side of the Coliseum the soil, in ages, has accumulated 
Fifteen or twenty feet high, but has been cleared away and the 
building that is left now, probably two-thirds of the whole, is now 
m splendid shape to be seen. The caste distinction between pie- 
bean and patrician is there so plainly seen as to worry the modern 
Socialist. The top stories for the poor folks have 'their special 
stairways just as the theatres of to-day have, and the poor were not 
allowed to come m contact with the rich. The lecturer explained 
that the people who at this day occupy the high and cheap seats, 
and are called "gallery gods" first got their name from the Coliseum 
because they were so high and so near up to heaven, but men in 
those days feared the hisses and loved the applause of "gallery 
gods" then just as they do now; and in politics and religion then 
just as they do now. 

When one gladiator had another one down and had him dis- 
armed and his foot on the throat of the fallen foe, he looked up 
to the people to have them say whether he must save or kill his 
prostrate foe. If the people turned their thumbs up the victor 
saved the life of the man because it showed that he had put up 



312 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



a good fight. If they turned their thumbs down that meant kill 
him. and the victor cut off the man's head, and the press and the 
pulpit are watching 'the thumbs of the 'gallery gods" to this day. 
Those fellows up there may have eaten peanuts, but they .did not 
chew tobacco and spit on the floor. 

The stones in the outer walls of the Coliseum were held 
together with iron clasps that were invisible, but the- .positions of 
these clasps were known by measurement and thousands of holes, 
six or eight inches in diameter, have been cut into the elegantly 
sculptured stone to get out this iron, but the parties who did it 
were afraid to go more than half way up the walls, and by that 
time there were so manv killed by falling that the work got to be too 
expensive. Workmen are engaged there all the time, doing all 
that monev and finest artisans can do to preserve the building as 
it is now/ The walls are thickest at the bottom and then slope 
back, on the inside, so as to have seats all the way to the top. They 
are about sixty feet thick at the bottom. Much of the work of 
the building is of brick, but the brick is as permanent as the rock 
or marble.'" All of this brick work was originally covered with 
stone or marble, but most of this ,stone and marble has been ship- 
ped off for building houses and to burn for lime. The brick work 
is quite different from ours. The bricks are about ten inches 
broad two inches thick and twenty-five inches long. They are a 
hard kind of potterv. In building them,into the walls there was 
no purpose to have the bricks lie as nearly together as possible, 
with a thin layer of mortar between them, as in our American 
brick laving, but the mortar is about as thick as the brick and the 
mortar/or cement, is as hard as the brick and adheres to the brick 
as if the brick and mortar were one solid piece. Mr. Charles U. 
Mathewson of Bristol, Vermont, was with old "Arkansas and 
me a part of the time we were wandering around through that old 
building There are so manv stories and stairways and halls and 
rooms and arches that when we got ready to go down to the ground 
we had considerable difficulty to find our way down. When we 
went afterward with the Cook party all expenses were paid for 
us but we had to pay about two and a half cents each to go up 
into the building when we went alone, though one can go into the 
main arena of the place without paying anything Origi nally the 
marble floor of the arena or stage formed a roof for the dens m 
which wild beasts were kept and in which f¥f ; ;? + her fl ^ 
sons condemned to death, were kept; but about half of this floor 
or roof has been removed, all on one end of the arena, and the 
dens and cells can be seen from above. There are two passages 
running side by side from outside the Coliseum under the ground 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIEXT 



313 



and under the walls ; one to the cells for the men and one to the 
dens for the beasts. 

Paul speaks of haying fought with wild beasts at Ephesus and 
it Is understood by Christians to mean that he fought these beasts 
as a gladiator. From Paul's own account of himself and from 
some things that give an idea of his physical proportions and 
prowess, in the Xew Testament, he must have been a man who 
would have lasted about fifteen seconds on the arena of the Coli- 
seum, and the "gallery gods" would have hissed and cat-called 
their disgust and disapproval , if any such weakling had been 
brought into the Coliseum. I guess if the hard pan facts about 
Paul's "lighting- with wild beasts" could be gotten at, it would 
about be that the bad boys set the dogs on him as a Salvation 
Army tramp and the Irish cons made it covenient to be around a 
corner and not see what as going on. Nobody of any intelligence 
about the Coliseum and about Paul would ever suppose that Paul 
ever fought man or beast in any such place as the Coliseum, unless 
the entertainment wound up with a farce, and Paul was put to 
fighting a small but enterprising dog with a stick, on its being 
known that Paul had taken a very cowardly part in the murder 
of Stephen. 

On March 28th the carriages and guides furnished by the 
Cooks took us out to see the city. All of the streets are laid in 
stone slabs about two feet square, that are smooth and that all lie 
smoothly on the streets. Through these are laid in very perfect 
style, the rails for the electric cars that run on all prominent 
streets passing every two or three minutes. In many parts of 
the city where, in modern .times, they have excavated to grade the 
streets there are found walls that have stood there covered for 
centuries and some of these walls are twenty or thirty feet high 
and right on top of .them that come up to the level of the soil, as 
it is now, there are built the walls of splendid new houses. ' I do 
not know whether these old walls are thus preserved by the city 
or by their private owners. 

We saw in one place quite a handsome public hospital/ nearly 
new, that had -been condemned to be torn down, because it was 
found there were important ruins under the ground upon which 
it was built. From the level of other ruins around there, I suppose, 
the bottoms of the ruins under that house must have been covered 
with thirty feet of soil that seemed as firm as the natural ground. 
I rode up in front, as usual. . The first thing that attracted my 
attention enough for special mention was the wonderful way in 
which some trees were trimmed that grew on each side of the street 
on which we were riding. It was some kind of a tree the foliage of 



314 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OEIEXT 



which was so thick that it made a solid mass of green, and it was 
cut into shape as perfect and systematic as if built of stone. The 
sides were as perpendicular and even as a wall and the tops were 
perfectly flat and of uniform height, and all the trees were of the 
same size and they lapped solidly across the street so that it seemed 
that we were driving through a tunnel or arcade sixty feet wide, 
thirty feet high to the top of the arch inside and fifty feet to the 
top outside, and a half mile long. "We came to the villa of the 
Borgias of which Lucrezia came nearer up to the idea of a harpy 
than anybody known to history. The founder of the family made a 
large fortune as a physician, a|id then became a banker, or broker, 
and as recoo-nition that he owed his fortune to medicine he made 
three bis golden pills and hung them in front of his banking house, 
and hence we have, to this day, the three balls that are the sign 
of the pawn broker's shop. There seemed to be fifty acres in the 
grounds around their villa. In front of that place was a city park 
of fifty or a hundred acres, and all through this park there were 
hundreds of statues of famous men, ancient and modern and almost 
clean up to date. It was a fair display of all ages and nations, 
regardless of what their respective distinctions were. There were 
among them some Popes, but it was not a collection that the cath- 
olic church would have gotten up to represent the great men of the 
world. 

We saw various obelisks that had been brought from E.owot 
with their hieroglvphic inscriptions on ..em, with Christian 
crosses stupidlv stuck up on top of them. It is a kind of irony that 
the most "stuck up" thing about Rome is the cross to commemorate 
one said to be "meek and lowly." W T e came up to a place on the 
brow of a great precipice sixty feet high, from which it is thought 
that the finest view of Eome can be gotten, and especially the view 
of St, Peter's and the Vatican. From that point the land slopes 
down to the Tibur, and from the Tibur it rises gradually, on the 
other side, to St. Peter's and the Vatican. That point there is 
arranged with everv comfort and convenience for those who want to 
take the view. In order to guard people against falling over 
that place there is a wall of beautiful masonry about three and one- 
half feet high and thirty feet long. I was some distance back m 
the procession of our carriages, but just as the head of our proces- 
sion got to that place a man went over that wall and fell on the 
solid ^stone road sixty feet below. The police saw him fall and 
ran to him immediately, but the man never moved, that anybody 
could see from above/ after he hit the ground. He was killed 
instantly. The Cookies seemed to think he fell over accidentally. 
He was'not one of our party. I think he suicided, because there 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



315 



was no more reason why anybody should get on top of that wall to 
see Borne than that one should get on top of that wall at Niagara 
to see the Falls, I think I know about suicides. Several times in 
my life I have carefully gone all along the argument for and against 
suicide and have refrained from it, either from the want of courage 
or from having too much courage; I never could tell. Lexington 
Kentucky, has more religion, whisky, tobacco, race horses, bad 
women, murder and suicide than any place of its size in the world. 
The men and women who kill other men and women in Lexington 
are generally very bad men. Sometimes they are not bad men, but 
the men who purposely kill themselves in Lexington are nearly 
always good men, and some good . women have killed themselves 
there. There are circumstances under which suicide is not only 
justifiable but right, and any dead man is in a better fix than any 
living one. I believe that man in Rome selected that place as 
being a place from which he could get the finest view on earth and 
voluntarily made that his last view of earth. 

We passed three columns, still standing, with the stones on 
top reaching from one to the other, that were built there B. C. 500. 
They were once a part of some magnificent building, all the balance 
of which is now gone. Then we saw a place where Castor and Pol- 
lux watered their horses that they had just ridden down from 
heaven to make arrangements to build Rome. It is an unpreten- 
tious place, only a few columns and tablets lying around on the 
ground, and not a very large spring, but a plenty of water for two 
horses. There will be people who will not believe that this actually 
occurred, but it must be so. for there is the spring yet and a tradi- 
tion of 2,500 years that it is so, and certainly so many people 
would not believe a thing for so long unless that thing was true. 
Beside this it must be remembered that along about that time 
Elijah drove two horses in a chariot to heaven, and travel on horse- 
back or in carriages between heaven and earth was not so uncom- 
mon in those days as it is now. It must also be remembered that 
this story about Castor and Pollux had its origin in a country and 
at a time that were the time and place of the greatest cultivation 
the world ever knew, while the story of Elijah and his horses had 
its origin among an ignorant nation of ex-slaves who were unedu- 
cated. Then we saw a place where Caligula had a golden statue of 
himself and that statue had to be dressed every morning and put 
into its "nighties" at night, and dressed for dinner just as Caligula 
was. If there is anything about a King that I do like it is to see 
them do up things in kingly style. Why can't our Edward VII 
have a golden statue of himself made and have its retinue of serv- 
ants to dress and undress it. I wish he would. I have no respect 



316 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE ORIEXT 



for this modern kind of royalty that can only show off its tricks 
like a jumping Jack when a Parliament or Prime Minister pulls 
the string that runs up its backbone. 

Then we saw an old Senate house built B. C, 651, and some 
arches ninety-five feet high with eighty-two and one-half feet span. 
Punning right along by the side of these old arches was a little piece 
of pavement about ten feet wide and about a hundred or so feet 
of which could yet be seen, and which like many of those other 
pieces, had been for centuries covered with ruins and rubbish and 
soil. On that piece of pavement originated what is now a popular 
slang. A foppish young fellow overtook Horace there and, in order 
to be, seen in the company of the poet and satyrist, insisted upon 
talking to Horace, when Horace did not want hiim Horace turned 
to him and said: "Does your mother know you are out?' The 
.voung man said: "My parents are both dead:" and Horace said: 
"6, lucky they!" 

We saw the place where Paul stood before Xero. The marble 
floor of the splendid judgment hall in which he stood is thirty-five 
feet lower than the ground around and has all been found by 
excavation. Then there was the Tarpeian rock, from which crim- 
inals were once thrown. I have in my notes that it is 160 feet high, 
but from my memory it does not appear nearly so high as that, 
and is not the frightful looking place that I expected to see from 
what I had read about it from boyhood. Homes are built nearly 
up to the edge of it. Close by that is a little temple that was 
erected to Peace, the pillars and portico of which are better pre- 
served than any ruins I saw in Rome. 

One night when ancient Eome was in all her glory, and there 
had been some great disorder in the city, some wild young fellows 
got a bucket of" red paint and wrote across the white marble face 
of that temple : "We have a temple to Peace but no peace." The 
guide said that was the oldest historic instance of "painting the 
town red." Then we went to St. Peter's. The building to the 
top of the dome is U7 feet. It is 611 feet long. St. Paul's, in 
London, is 500 feet long. The ceiling in St. Peter's is 160 feet 
high, and is held up by columns about forty feet by twenty. I do 
not remember how many of those columns there are. St. Peter's 
was built by Michael Angelo, the greatest combination of great 
talents that ever lived. The external architecture of St. Peter's 
is singular almost to the extent of being a freak. There is a kind 
of a porch that is upheld by hundreds of columns that are about 
six feet in diameter and fifty feet high, that runs from each corner 
of the front of the building, several hundred feet at right angles 
with the front and then commences to circle on each side, until 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIEXT 3U 
the whole encloses about three-fourths of a riwlp +W ; a 1 i. 

ndTn t 1 m r + b f din i that he StlU had a Iot <** m^Z' 
St ttrf hi ? th3t ' 38 3 COntraetor would d » now he 

±ne capital at Washington cost $7 000 000 tj i > 

$50,000,000 The Protests all s | Xt'the' Cfc^ 
the money to bmld this chureh by the "sale of iJ^nt™ 
had a program that had every crime on it that an ^n espeeh • 
agood Christian, wonld want to commit; the price tto'a man had 
to pay for committing any one of these things was printed op osfte 
the thing For instance, a man could slap his mot er m aw for a 
mekel I suppose the indulgence in that one luxury Wht in 
more than $1 000,000. He could lock her out of L how for 
ten cents and kill her for $1.30. The Protestants sa that the 
>a hey raised the money to build that church; but when it comes 
to talking about religion a Protestant is the biggest lilr on earth- 
that is, except a Catholic. I think that eharge%ains the Cathoh^ 
Church is a slander and a libel, and 1 don't believe it is true 
because all of them had from the beginning of the Cathol e Church 
committed every crime they could think of without par no for ' 
and I do not believe they would all, at that late day, just Igree to 
pay for the privilege of committing any deviltry theV wanted to do 
when one of the rights of any true Catholic had Always beta to 
commit any crime that he wanted to commit without pS -for it 
When you get inside of St. Peter's and start from the front 

& fln T w + a f r . tl ) ere Pkces ^ the beautiful mosaic mar- 
ble floor that state that from the altar of St. Peter's to those places 
respectively, are the lengths of other famous churches, /think 
there are tour or five of these and only remember that St. Paul's 
Cathedral at London, and the Cathedral at Milan are two of them" 
You go of course. Ill feet from the main entrance toward the 
altar before you come to the longest next to St. Peter's that is St 
Pauls at London St. Peter's is built in the form of a cross and 
about where the two parts of a cross cross each other there is built 



318 DOG FEXXEL tN THE ORIENT 

a most gorgeous affair, that is railed off, and in which there are 
kept, continually burning, very beautiful and costly candles. This 
place is about thirty feet long and fifteen broad and there were 
Ibout twenty-five people praying there. Whether these people had 
a regular job of praying there, and no others were admitted there 
I do not know, but I watched Sweeny and saw that he did not 
go in and so I supposed Tt was only for priests that could pray m 
Latm and that just common, every-day praying did not count m 
that place In fact, it would not do to let just anybody go m 
tore to pray for some fellow might slip ten or fifteen thousand 
dXs^orth of gold and jewels in his P!^^*^ 
had their eves shut. The special reason why this was such an 
excellent place to pray was because there was an arm of St. Peter 
and one from St. Paul buried there. I do not know whether those 
two gentleTen each had an arm amputated just to send i as a 
kleplake to the brethren at Rome, or whether ^those^rms ^ad be^n 
p,^ off those two parties after they were dead. I did not see tne 

'rawav w thlny descriptive powers that I can 

S2 $!3i*g$te seventy feet high and t^ty feet too* 

fuade^f gold -^.^^^.^^J&Mgh 
assortment of angels all the way troni g 



.Yonder how the little ones got out of 
>™p of the big angels are blowing great 

with horns. P P+Pr 's are gotten up like 

But all the male celebrities m St. Pete b are g I 



nng. 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 319 

Nearly all the time on that cruise I had a good time but some 
times I got worried, and up there on the left fide of that big ™le 
of angels and things was one of the places that I got wo?ried 
There was a piece of statuary that you could not buy out of that 
meeting house for two million dollars. It was a Sure of a 
man and woman that would be ten feet high if they weZ lZiit 
ened up, but the woman was reclining on a nice patch 7bH« 
and flowers all cut out of solid white marble and ,1 f ! 
her elbow down on the ground and her head resting on her hand 
She had a suit of hair like a hair restorative advertisement The 
man was standing looking at her. I think he wal leaning Tover the 
woman I did not spend much time looking at mm ! su'ose 
old Mike chiseled out that man and woman. It is prrttv much like 
Mark Twain suggests: When you see anything about Rome that is 
extra fine and you don't know who did it! it is generallfmettv safe 
to lay it on old Mike Angelo. When old Mike got th ough that 
job that woman did not have a single stich of clothes on her anv 

a m °spare4 n W Z ^ 4^ ^ M been mTde out 0? 
a sparerib, but after that couple had been there where thev are 

tie"™ l0 f, g time ' thatTOm » ™ found to be too hard on 

he poaching brethren, and they made out of some kind of metal 
that looks exactly like the marble of that statuary, a dress cm S 
m the neck and so long that yon don't see any of that woman but 
her head and neck and arms, and the thing that old Mike spent 

ItalfanTo ° V ^ ^ ^ metal ^ t 

let on in T T t0Ck ° n S ° me ° ther vandal wh0 W0 «W put panta! 

let, on the legs of a piano, or of the Sphinx. That is the only case 

chn; e ch. SaW WhOTe Purit3n h8d ^ ln his ™* - the clX 

The guide told us that the woman's dress was metal and all 
of us, including myself, tapped on it with our knuckles to see H 
t was certainly so, and so many people had done the same thing 
before that there was a large spot that had been colored oh that 
EZla meta l Jr S l 7 P60ple ta PP in S on ^ ™th thdr knock es 

or hTr anTtannerit ^ ^ T* °? ^ ^° ™* before h ^ 
or ner and tapped it— a sort of runic rapping, this everlasting 

tappmg-and yet "doubting Thomas" has been sti "matted f of 

wanting evidence of what he was expected to believe Of a Tl the 

sav th?tT l0 t ed at ^ j ° b ' 1 ™ the °*7 ™ hat wi e e 
say that he or she was disgusted and indignant at the sent mint 

k Iff 1 1 i J?* 1 * 1 d , reSS n 0n that WOman ' H some other Pope wS 
Then we went across and took a look at old Peter, the old cock 



3 o DOG FENNEL IN THE OBIENT 

that made another eoek crow by his lying. Of course, the first 
h t bont hint that we wanted to see was if he had tas toe kissed 
off Ever since I was a little boy I have read and heard about 
that statue of Peter that had Ins toe kissed until .t was entirelj 
worn off and they had to keep constantlv on hand a supply of toes 
made out of chilled steel so as to screw on a new one whenever an ok 
one was worn away by the perpetual osculation of devotee, and 
vet of all historians who have slung ink 1 am the first man to say 
J the world hat that story about that old Peter's toe being kissed 
off is a lte out of whole cloth, for which there is not a semtiUa 
of foundation except the fact that it is kissed by a great many fools. 
SSStKS* who kiss that old cock's cast-iron toe-or bronze 
or Mack marble or whatever the black thing is-are women and 
Suetoto I ha^e never had any special experience m krssing ba n 
omliTof mv own family, because 1 ^.^^^t 

^ 

o nf pretty women in Italy and it has been my luck to feM 

nm Peter should get tired sitting there and pull m his toe that 

behind him. and his toe now is pretty nearly as big as my fist, and 
that is no baby affair. 

One might imagine that such a lass as Sweeny, a big I™hman, 
migh t ^ that toe S would leave a small scratch on i > -h 
stream of kisses on that tee from the time old Mike put it up 
here to his day would not take off one corn or tarn ha s toe-nai 
Tt i one nf the most appropriate things m the world that the mil 
Ls of lies that have teen told about that toe, the toe ,t rom whmh 

S^SaTSS 2S^«S not hold a candle. It could 
and tc . a woman at that, and said he would be damned ,t he had 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIENT m 

Ihe Christians attribute to Jesus Chv^i + 

the most distinguished liar in the worM 1 Ixee t n^ia^ 
Munchausen and Joe Mulhatton, to bui d his church on 

saw that he had made a mistake that made his Master suffer There 
P.p« m „J tilt! ,,„, „. llk , P k™,*,™ " 

* f i «T fSKfs*;^ e -as 

»S TSSVi'siS ssfaaSia: 3 

gave it the go-by I ventured to give his old toe a t.dst Vust to 
assure myselt that new ones were not screwed on every few month" 
and that the present one was not a particle more worn off th n old 
Peters nose was worn off. And yet the whole Christian worid^or 
at least the Roman Catholic and the Protestant part ofT-have 
ever smce I was born, been circulating that lie about Pe er's toe 
being worn off by the hisses of Christians, a degradation hat a 
poor dog would not descend to and a charge that Jy Xon except 
Christianity would scorn as contemptible. Then' there was the 
column from the temple of Solomon, against which Jem Lined 
when he disputed with the doctors in the temple-that t som ool 

SfSAJ^Z! eoll,mn and some lL said ^ beliS 

We saw "The Yellow Tibur." It is still vellow and seems likelv 
to continue the habit. It gets its complexion from Kg 



322 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

jaundice of the people who live on it. It is about 500 feet broad 
and seems to be a pretty deep river from having been drawn m 
on each side by costly wails. At the end of a bridge that we crossed 
is the o-reat round prison in which the beautiful Beatnze Cenci 
was imprison for killing her pa. so said : but as nobody ever proved 
it on her the indication seems to be that it was a good scheme tor 
some Pope or big Cardinal to get to be the confessor ot a tamous 
beauty under such retired circumstances that nobody would get a 
chance to hear all the shortcomings that Betty confessed to him 
But my friends have asked me not to write about things that 
they could read about in the guide books, and I refer all of you who 
want further information under that head to Beadaker. 

I am a hayseed and at one place I saw some hay stacks that 
would daze a Dog Fennel hay raiser. They were hay stacks stand- 
ing in the open air. Each stack had in it about thirty tons 
oAiav and they were using off of them all of the time and those 
stack^ would stand there and have good hay in them for twenty-live 
years : straight goods. ; 1,1.+ 

Over across the roads from those hay stacks Borne had. at 
some time in its mediaeval history, undertaken to build a pyramid. 
It would make an Egyptian laugh to look at it They had gotten 
it about as bis- as three of those hay stacks and then topped it oft 
because they saw it took too much rock. The hay stacks were thirty 
feet high and the pyramid about forty-five. 

On Sunday we went to St. Paul outside the walls. It is said 
to be "the finest church in Pome, though not nearly so large as bt 
Peter's but they are still building on it and may be m a hundred 
years from now if before that time, reason does not call a halt on 

E ° m You would suppose there would be thousands of people at 
worship there on Sunday, but if I had not had ten times that many 
when I used to preach out among the rocks and trees m the moun- 
tain, of Kentucky I would not have felt like I was doing anything 
In the o-reat St. Paul's, in Pome, the finest church m Pome, the 
greatest of the two heads of the Christian religion, there were off 
in one little corner at worship, under the management of a gor- 
geously bedecked priest, sixteen people, four of whom were men, 
and we Cookies tramped around looking at the place just like the 
worshipers were not in it. The place was just so gorgeously beautiful 
that I could not describe it. and you could not understand it if 
I could " 1 could only guess at things, and I guessed there were 
three million dollars worth of gold in the ceiling of that house; 
that is counting the value of the gold and the expense of putting- 
it where it is. in the shape that it is. 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 323 
The long rows of monolithic columns made of all the fine mar- 

nnilw rT ^° ne \ m w W ? rld ' SOme of them as hard as and 
polished like French plate glass, tell the tale of the mints of money 

and inestimable labor that are expended to gratify the pride of 
those who are the followers of the man who said: "Go and sell al 
yon hare and give to the poor," and who said that a rich man could 
no more to go heaven than that camel that I tried to ride in Jeru- 
salem, that had gotten a hump on himself, could go through the eve 
of a needle, and yet all of this is done under the eyes of the latest 
representative of Jesus Christ on earth ; a dried "up, skmn old 
bachelor with not a wife nor chick nor child (supposablv) in the 
world, and who has $20,000,000, for pin money/and lives in the 
house that we all saw, with 1500 rooms in it, and vet is always 
fretting and frowning and fussing and cussing because of his hard 
lot, and gets the prayers and sympathies of millions of fools and 
hypocrites who console him with the hope of crowns and harps that 
he will wear and plunk m heaven to pay for the martyrdom that he 
has suffered ,n tins world, and there is not a priest of preacher 
black or white, male or female, in Lexington, today that would not 
jump at any possible chance to get into that old Pope's shoes; and 
yet people of education are surprised that Anarchists and Socialists 
are nursing their wrath to keep it warm," and are "heaping up 
wrath against the day of wrath," like fire and explosives pent up 
under Pelee and A esuvius that some day will pour some molten 
floods of wrath upon the fantastic capers that Christianity cuts 
before high heaven m these United States of America, and leave 

or'one to'hf'T 111611 ! 8 ^ peleSS J bnrifid r ™ llke Herculaneum 
or one to be exhumed m thousands of years to come, and to be 
looked at by strangers from foreign shores as we looked at Pompeii 
and the rums of the fanes and temples and forums and theaters 
of the Rome that worshiped the old gods among the ruins of which 
now stand these temples bedecked and bedizened with million, 
oi money m gewgaws and senseless gimcracks and all in the interest 
oi a libidinous gang of priests more degraded than the hogs that 
ran down into the sea with the devil in them at Gadara. 

1A . J n / r 1 ont 1 of F auFs in an obelisk fl 'om Hehopolis, in Egypt 

in thfwnrlf ' A ^ Pr0 K ably highe3t ™*°fl«fle cofuinn 

m the world. A cross has been stuck on the top of that 

Then we went to the church of St. John Latteran and saw 
another collection of this ineffable gorgeousness. From Italy the 
the head of the Christian religion that exhibits all this wealth in 

MopTpTqi t? r gl ° n ' We Saikd 3Wa - Y haTin § 111 the steera ge of the 
Moltke 791 Italians, men, women and children, the only entertain- 
ment oi which seemed to be petty gambling with old dirty and 



324 DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 

greasy cards and other appliances that a Kentucky Negro would 
not have and these people came to America because they cannot get 
the comforts of life in a country that builds Christian churches 
of gold and costly stones and elegant carvings and paintings. 

Religions grow up and rot down like weeds. Thus grew and 
rotted the religions of India, Egypt, Ancient Italy and Ancient 
Palestine, and thus has grown the religion of latter Jerusalem and 
latter Rome, which has borne its fruitage of Dead Sea apples that 
have turned to ashes in your grasp, and that, at the stake, has turned 
to ashes some of the grandest and best of men and women that 

have lived. ■ a _ _ T , 

The special distinction of the church of St. John Latteran is 
that it has in it the table at- which Jesus and the disciples ate the 
a la*t supper ' 3 

^ I was exceedingly anxious to see that table. The church is very 
eleo-ant and has many magnificent pictures, but I wanted to see that 
table more than anv thing about that church. There were young 
men walking about in the church with dresses on like the priests 
who seemed to be there for the purpose of giving information and 
we told one of these that we wanted to see the table upon which 
Jesus and his disciples ate the last supper. There were about twenty 
of us in the partv that asked him. He said we could see it, but he 
indicated that there was considerable red tape to be encountered 
in getting to see the table, but he asked us to follow him, and we 
did so gladly. It seemed to me that anything so sacred ought to 
have been put in a place where everybody could see it without any 
trouble, but that it ought to be kept protected by a railing of some 
kind so that there would be no danger of any damage being done 

t0 1 We followed the young man who had the Mother Hubbard on 
and he led us at a pretty lively gate through an intricacy ot elegant 
architecture and pictures and sculptures and finally came to a mas- 
sive door of some costly kind of wood upon which was a lot ot 
fine carving. 

We *tood at that door and he knocked on it. To that magic 
kind of a knock we had all frequently before seen doors come 
open like those we read about in enchanted castles and I expected 
every second to see it flv open in the "open sesame style and that 
we would see the table, large and strong and big enough for Jesus 
and his twelve disciples, making thirteen at the table 

I knew that the New Testament indicated that at that last sup- 
per thev did not sit on benches, but reclined on couches after the 
custom of that day, but I knew the "old masters" had never paid 
any regard to the New Testament in painting their pictures; had 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 325 

probably never read it, if they could read it at all, and, that in spite 
ot the New Testament teaching to the contrary, all he famous 
pictures of the last supper represented Jesus and his disciples as 
sitting on benches, and all sitting on one side of the able, and all 
tacmg one way, so that all could be seen in a snap shot picture if 
anybody happened along with a kodak. 

But that big door did not open and the young fellow said so 
our guide told us, that we would please wait a few minutes until* hp 
went and got the key. The fellow went and- we waited until 

?w P /n enCe W *1 a11 exhausted and w hen I began to suspect that 
that fellow was lying, he came with the key and we were ushered 
into a splendid large room. 

There were in there a man and a woman, both good looking 
and we were told that the man would tell us all about it. We 
tramped around there very impatiently looking at pictures until the 
man and the woman finally got through their confab, and we were 
all very polite to him for the kindness he was about to do us Then 
the fellow got up and started for the door that we had all come in 
through, but did not pay any attention to us. He could talk English 
and we asked him to show us the table, but he said he was not a 
guide there, and he went off and kneeled and got to saying his 
prayers, I suppose. & 

The- others scattered and said it was a lost ball, but I stood 
patiently and waited until he. got through his prayer, and then I 
explained to him my fix and that I was very anxious to see the table 
and that I would take it as a great favor if he would help me to 
Und it, and I looked as old and as pious as I possibly could to ap- 
peal to the fellow's sympathies ; but that fellow was the meanest 
man I met on the tour except that fellow at the tomb of Jesus at 
Calvary, and the two men we took along with us Wood, of Eichmond 
and the Chicago dynamite man. 

Finally the fellow started as if he was going to show me and I 
lollowed him a few steps and he pointed to a picture of Christ and 
his disciples m gold that looked like it might have about a half 
million dollars worth of gold in it, and that was up above an altar 
in the church and the fool said either that that was the table that 
1 wanted to see or that the table was concealed from view behind 
that ; I could not tell which he meant. I had seen gold and pictures 
until I was tired of looking at them and I hardly glanced at the 
thing he showed me. 

Mr Wilford A. Bean, of Northbridge Massachusetts— no 
km to the Boston Baked Bean family— was a good friend to me 
our whole tour and agreed with me perfectly about these church 
takes, and from him I got an idea that that 'table was to be seen 



326 



DOG FEXXEL IN THE OKI EOT 



somewhere in the church, and I begged him to let me know about 
it if he found it. but he did find it, and I never got to see it. 

From him and from others who saw that table I got the fol- 
lowing account. The "table" is nothing but a piece of plank 
about two and one half feet long and fifteen inches wide. It is 
simply a plain piece of plank. If I could have seen it I would have 
told whether it seemed to be very ancient, or was hewed out 
or sawed out. but none of those who had seen it seemed to have 
gotten any particulars about it. and from all I could learn it was 
simply an old piece of plank such as could be found about many 
plank yards in that country. 

They were not to be blamed though, probably, for not having 
examined it more carefully. In order to get to it they all had to 
climb a dark stair and go into a dark closet one at a time, and I 
suppose had to pay a special fee, and then only by the light of a 
wax candle thev could see back in a dark and narrow corner this 
piece of plank that in Lexington would be split up to kindle a fire 
and that piece of plank is the famous table of the last supper that 
gives to this o- rgeous church its fame. 

Of all who were in our cruise, so far as I understand, only 
about five or six got to see it, and I am very sorry that I was not 
one of the number. 

We saw the Pope's throne. It is a nice piece of furniture. 
Then we went to see the "sacra scala* — the holy stair. 
The church in which the holy stair is has nothing of impor- 
tance except the stairs. So far as I could learn the church was 
built by human beings as churches are commonly built, but these 
stairs were certainly brought by an angel from Jerusalem one night 
and put right where thev now are, and these white marbles steps 
are certainly the identical vellow stone steps that Jesus Christ went 
up and upon a platform upon the top of which he was crucified m 
the Church of the Holv Sepulcher in Jerusalem. That this is 
absolutely so is beyond a doubt, because the Pope and all the 
Catholic big wigs in Borne say so. It does not cut any ice at all that 
the X T says Jesus was crucified on Mount Calvary, outside the 
walls of Jerusalem. The X. T. may do all right for this little gang 
of backwoods Protestants around Lexington, but when Sweeny 
and the Pope say a thing is so in the Catholic religion, the religion 
from which all Protestantism sprung, that do settle it. You may 
not be aide to understand how the identical same yellow stone steps 
that we saw in Jerusalem are the identical white marble steps that 
we saw in Borne, but I myself noticed that the steps m each place 
were about the same in number and about the same length, so that 
it looks like there might be something in it, and when I add my 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIEXT 



327 



testimony to that of Sweeny and the Pope if you can't see it, it is 
your misfortune and not our fault. The only thorough test of 
religious orthodoxy is to believe what you positively know is not so. 
Jesus and Tertullian alike taught that there was high moral quality 
in believing things that were directly opposed to common sense and 
sound reason. 

Jesus said that the bread and wine that he used at the last sup- 
per, when he and his disciples sat around that piece of plank in 
St. John Latteran, were real and literal, simon pure/ bonafide, 
flesh and blood — no hocus pocus about it ; no "tend like/' nor anv- 
thing of that kind. The Catholic is consistent. He believes that 
what Jesus Christ said there is true, and that what anybodv else 
would call bread and wine, are really flesh and blood, and so the 
priest feeds the meat to the people and drinks all the blood himself. 
Protestantism is only a kind of mugwump Christianity, and don't 
believe that story about the meat and the blood. Protestants are 
not fit to be Christians and the Infidels won't have them. 

As the church in which those steps are would certainlv be a 
very incomplete thing without the steps, as the steps are the main 
part of it, and there would have been a big useless hole right 
through the middle of the house if the steps were not there, it is 
evident that the people who built lie church had had an under- 
standing with the angel that he was to furnish the steps for it. or 
the angel must have brought those steps from Jerusalem and just 
set them down there, the bottom on the ground and the other end 
just sticking up in the air, and not going upstairs to anv place 
particularly, and then masons must have come and built the house 
to fit the steps. There is. at the head of these steps, a life-sized 
picture of Jesus Christ. That picture was painted there by the 
same angel that brought the steps and the steps were fixed and that 
picture painted, all in the same night, and it had to be done in time 
for the angel to get back to Jerusalem or to heaven, or wherever 
he went, all before day, for nobody is reported to have seen the 
angel and it was probably not a moonlight night and it was before 
Rome had her present arrangements for lighting by gas and before 
electricity. That picture at the top of those steps, though painted by 
an angel, is not ranked by picture connoiseurs as one of the fine 
paintings of Rome, while those of Michael Angelo that are stuck 
around everywhere there are regarded as the finest in the world. 
But then it ought to be rememberd, in justice to the angel, that the 
angel had to do that painting and fix the steps too, all in the dark, 
while old Mike took twenty years to paint one of the pictures in the 
Sistine Chapel. But then, in justice to Mike, it ought to be remem- 



328 



DOG FENXEL IN THE ORIENT 



bered that lie bossed the building of St. Peter's, compared with 
which the angel's step job was simply not in it. 

As I stood at Rome and looked at those famous steps, there 
were seventeen women and two men and one boy going up them on 
their knees as well as I could count, for by the time I could count 
them from top to bottom some would be getting off onto the plat- 
form at the top, while others were just kneeling on the lowest step 
at the bottom. All of them were saying their prayers — unless it 
was the boy— that is, their mouths were working and I don't reckon 
they were chewing gum. The boy was sweeping down the steps 
with an ordinary house broom, like we use in America. Being 
on his knees it was awkward for him to sweep in that fix, but I 
suppose he would have certainly lost his job, and probably have lost 
his soul in hell, if he had gotten up on his feet to do that sweeping. 
I could not see any occasion for the sweeping unless it was just 
to sweep down the dirty old sins of the people that fell off on the 
steps, for there was not a foot touching those steps and they were 
continually being wiped by the silks and satins and velvets of rich 
women who went up them on their knees, and I don't think an}^- 
body but people dressed in store clothes were allowed to go up 
there. 

After they got to the top I could never see what became of 
any of them, and they all just ascended to heaven, so far as I can 
testify to the contrary. I would like to have seen what the show 
was up there, but although T do a lot of walking around on my 
knees, working in my garden of "Quakeraere," in Dog Fennel, I 
have never had any practice walking up marble steps on my knees 
and saying my prayers as I went. These steps are as I have told 
you, white marble, and yet there is but a little part of the marble 
that yon can see, because the white marble steps that the angel 
brought there from Jerusalem are so badly worn by the friction of 
the soft knees that they are now covered by steps that look like they 
might have been made of Kentucky black walnut plank about two 
inches thick, so that the white marble steps are seen through open- 
ings in the wooden cover left there for that purpose, and through 
these openings you can see that the edges of the white marble steps 
have been worn, I would guess from an inch to an inch and a half. 
Some ungodly gainsayer might suggest that these steps were 
originally like any other marble steps and that they had been pur- 
posely beveled off that way to make believe they were worn by people 
going up on their knees, from the fact that each step seems to be 
worn the same way, clean across from one wall to the other, while 
it would be natural to suppose that nearly all persons would go 
up near the middle of the steps as we then saw them doing, and 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OKI EXT 399 

It was up these steps, on his knees, that Mr. Thomas Hunt 

an f^Z 7 ' T°{ Ve ?\ He had P re ™«^' b»M me Xt heTas 
£ ! It' ? f T h f n 1 Char « ed him with hypocrisy in tins matter 

tens Hi \ S ^? ly ,° S6e Wh8t ^ at a Sp of the 

step,. PEs sister, Mrs. Elizabeth H. Hoel, of WaynesviUe Ohio 
ako went up the steps with him at the same time. They are both 2 
good people as were on that boat, were both good friends to me 
St 1° alket - Erer . Y ' :i0C '/ on thetat W 

that she dtd not go up on her knees. I believe what Mb Hod says 

uXrstetl 1 thgre t0 ^ Pe ° ple t0 011 their knees go ng 
*P those steps even as much as there was to force us to crawfish 
out of the garden of Gethsemane, or from the various places where 

wT hrLbodvlut T i burie f- B + Ut the common 

was Mat nobodj but the devout went up those steps, and that thev 
should go on their knees not only in reverence, but becaie thev 
would not put their shoes upon' a place where ladi« put t heir 
fine dresses. It may be that that boy was sweeping off tho4 to 
because Mrs. Hoel had gone up there not on her knees when I was 
staying back, looking for that "table " 

From my intimate association with this brother and sister on 
a tour that shows the true inwardness of men and women 1 am 
proud to claim these two persons on the list of my friend 'and Tt 
I can regard them as my friends, certainly I ought not to complain 

t if hf ftl- ° 0kleS ; Vh V Ven r t UP th ° Se Sfe P S 0n their Wfa'd 
yet it the Cooks were to offer free tickets for me and my family 

for another Oriental tour, on the condition that I was to go up 

The P wT kneeS 'J Wh6tber 1 WOukl take their tfeket" 

The last place m Rome that I went to see is the church of 
he Capuchins. It is the place where the Monks burv "lad 

n fheTht skew"" ^ ^ ^ ^ USe their bones either 
m the whole skeletons or in separate pieces to decorate a sort of 
catacombs that they have. The walls and ceilings have many deco 
rations, including lamps, made of these bones. Thev are vo ted 
mto varieties of vines and flowers, and one large ornamenta ion is 



330 DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 

made of knee caps. I forgot to say. in the proper place, that 
Z J f on tl e Vear that we saw upon rocks, some of winch were 
hree or fonr thousand years old. it would take billions of people 
to go up those steps on their knees to wear the steps as much as 
seems to have heen done. 

" I saw everything in Borne that I cared to see except the Pope, 
the Vatican and the Catacombs. I saw the Vatican externa y. 
From Rome we went hack to Naples, and on April 2 sailed to \ille- 
franche 360 miles. Yillefranche is only four or fire miles from 
Nice Nice is a lovely city and has a beautiful bay. At our lunch 
at the hotel to which I was assigned there was in the dining room 
the largest mirror I ever saw— twenty-fire by fifteen feet. The city 
is lovely so long as von stav under the shade of the trees, but with 
so manr white or light yellow buildings of marble and stone and 
the white -tone in the streets the glow of the sun was such that I 
could hardlv see. I found there a cheering letter from my wife. 
But the main reason for stopping at Nice is to go to see Monte 
Carlo It is five or six miles from Nice and we went to it b 3 a 
railway that ran along the edge of the bay, but which was about 
half the time under the gronnd. , 

I had wondered, in looking over Cooks itenerary that they 
made Monte Carlo one of Us points, and I was rather : sorry that 
we were to stop there as the last place we were to see on the tour. 
I am in my sixtv-sixth year and I had never, m my whole lite a, 
far as I can recall, seen a dollar lost or won m a bet, and it looks 
like another one of the many appositions of my checkered life that 
the first gambling I ever saw was to be at Monte Carlo. After get- 
tog there? thongh, I could see why we were taken to see the p ace 
It is one of the most beautiful places in the world, standing above 
the sea on a picturesque mountain. I had heard of Monte Carlo 
for many rears and expected to see something beautiful, but I had 
never anticipated anything like what we saw. The Casino is, of 
con e the principal attraction of the place, but there is an elegant 

t H ere, the whole of which is devoted to the entertainment 
the rich gamblers that come there from all over the world. There 
vaVa nark or garden that had in it our Kentucky blue grass and 
exquisite flowers in all the varied forms of the gardener's art. The 
Garino is eternally and internally, as costly in its ge -up as one 
can easily imagine. It has everything that could appeal to the eye 
of cultivated people. As intensely wicked as it is there is nothing 
■■ o d' aoout \t Lid it is one of the most orderly ^ yo^ever 
saw a model of peace and qniet as compared with the Church ot 
Z Holv Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and a man on the cruise who wa< 
a aevout Episcopalian and an exquisite m dress was not allowed 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 331 

to come into the Casino. He was a nice gentleman and was rich 
He had a rather vain air about him and sometimes affected knee 
breeches, apparently to show his handsome leg and nice foot 
Nobody on the Moltke was offended by it, bu/it was generally 
regarded as a little but harmless weakness, especially in a gray 
headed man as he was. When he started to go into the Casino he 
was stopped and told that his dress would not be admitted there 
and he did not get m. My clothes were a black suit that cost me 
$12.00 m Lexington, and they were the suit, that I had worn all 
the time I did not know that there was any reflation about 
dress, and there was not, except that it was required that it should 
be.m good taste and I had gone in an had come out before I heard 
there was any regulation on the subject, and butlers and stewards 
and men m waiting dressed fine enough for kings were, so far 
as I could see .just as respectful to me as if I had been Roosevelt 
there was such a maze of parlors and drawing rooms and halls and 
arches and galleries of paintings and statuary that I walked around 
among them for a long time before I saw anything that looked 
like gambling and then I went into the gambling part of the build- 
ing, ihis was m a number of gorgeously decorated rooms that 
opened into each other through doors so large that they seemed 
almost as one room. There were in these twenty-five or thirty 
splendid tables about half of which were for roulette and half for 

1 Tl IP 16 T m Sit d0Se J* t0 e * ch other ^ound 
each one of these tables, and every seat at all of them was full, and 
there were packed at the backs of the chairs, just as thick as they 
could stand, men and women who were continually handing in their 
money to be bet by those in the chairs, so that I suppose there 
were about 200 people at each table. The people at those tables 
were old men and old women, and young men and young women, 
but no boys were allowed in the building without matured people 
wno Mmcned ior them. 1 suppose all the seats at those tables were 
paid for. The women who sat at them were dressed in the finest 
of toilets and sparkled with diamonds. No one around those tables 
spoke a word, not even in a whisper. One bet would be decided 
m about every two minutes. On some of these tables the money 
bet seemed to be in about twenty dollar gold pieces. At the decision 
ot each bet the man who managed that table used 'a thing like a 
hoe or a rake and he would rake in great piles of gold into a box 

^/Tf fh f A; an( V r T this b0X he would P itch Sold to either 
nd of that table and all over it so fast that you could not keep 
ip with the motion of his hand. It seemed to go in the right 
amount and to the right place every time for the people picked up 
the amounts of gold and nobody spoke a word or expressed any 



332 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



dissatisfaction. At other tables they were betting bills, of which 
there .were great stacks. They were so different from our money 
that, handled as they were, I could not tell their denomination 
except in one instance, and I thought that bill was equal to $200 
of our money. I could not see on the face of any of those gamblers, 
men or women, any expression of regret or of pleasure, but I under- 
stood it was a common thing for people to walk away from those 
tables and suicide. These games seemed to go on all day, every 
dav, and until late at night. 

There were many of the most beautiful women there that I 
ever saw. They were elegantly dressed and in the finest taste, but 
their manners were those of ladies. Whether they were ladies or 
bad women I could not tell, but I suppose a large per cent of them 
were naughty. It all struck me as the most depraved place I had 
ever seen and those old gray-headed she devils, all bloated with 
liquor and high living, were the most depraved specimens of the 
human race I ever saw. 

All of this time you could hear, out in the grounds, the con- 
tinual popping of shot-guns, and at nine-enths of the fires a 
pretty, innocent pigeon would fall, and a dog would run and bring 
it in his mouth, and a brute, incomparably lower than the dog, 
would run and put another pigeon in that trap for another brute, 
meaner than a bull terrier, to shoot. 

. When I got home I found that one of the Yanderbilts was 
announced in the papers as shooting pigeons at Monte Carlo. I 
hate Anarchy, but if it breaks out some day in America and wipes 
off of the face of the earth, the people who go from here to Monte 
Carlo, to amuse themselves, the world would be better off. 

One of the Catholic women on the Moltke came to dinner that 
nioiit bragging that she had gambled at Monte Carlo, and had come 
out eighteen dollars ahead, and she was all excitement to get back 
there to get to gambling again. She was just the kind of a party 
to go up those angel steps in Borne, saying her prayers as she went, 
and the kind that expects to plunk a harp in heaven when she 
hands in her checks. She was Irish and was just hell-bent on get- 
ting another Irish husband, and I advise any honest Irishman to 
steer clear of any woman who would gamble at Monte Carlo _ I 
saw another woman of the Moltke party who was a splendid looking 
woman and a very brilliant woman. She told me that she had 
been an Episcopalian, but was "not much of anything now, mean- 
ing as I understood her, that she was now inclined to Infidelity. 
She was starting out, as she told me, to gamble at Monte Carlo. 
The representative Infidels of the country don't want any such 
L They have all the dead weight that they can carry now. 



women, 



DOG FENNEL IN THE OBIEXT 



333 



I went away from Monte Carlo more discouraged by the outlook 
for the human race than I had ever been before. 

Carlisle said of the people of London that they were "mostly 
fools." His mistake was in limiting his remarks to London. The 
matter with the people is that they have no good common sense 
Good morals is simply another name for good common sense, and 
so long as Popes and Patriarchs and priests" and preachers can make 
fat livings by teaching the people religion, as a substitute for good 
sense and good morals, things will go on just as thev are now ; one 
big part of the world will be killing themselves by indulgence and 
excess and another big part will be suffering for the necessities of 
life. A man said to me that I reminded him of Jesus disputing 
with the doctors in the temple. I don't know whether it was 
the harder on me or Jesus. 

When we got back to the boat we had to preach for us a Rev 
Jessup, who had been a missionary in Palestine for forty-seven 
years and was coming back to see his people in America. I went 
with pleasure to hear him and thought, of course, he was going 
to give us some arguments fresh from the Holv Land. He 
preached the same old rot about old Palev and his old turnip of 
a watch that a theological college had loaded me to the muzzle with 
m 1859, and it gave me a case of that "tired Reeling." After one 
of the entertainments of that kind the people did me the kindness 
and honor to call for me, but I declined with thanks. I appreciated 
the compliment all the more because it was near the end of the 
cruise when the people knew more about me than in the beginning. 

I failed to say, in the right place, that on March 30th we saw 
the Alps, 13,000 feet high. 



CHAPTER. XT. 



On April 2d we raised our anchor for the last time and sailed 
— that is steamed — for Yew York. 3.800 miles away. 

We had many times watched the ponderous chains roll over 
the drums of the great steam capstans as they lowered the anchor 
down, down, down so many fathoms in the deep harbors that it 
surprised us, and many times we had heard that sound when we 
were in bed at night, or early in the morning more frequently, and 
knew that it meant we were at some fax-off place which many on 
the Moltke had seen before and wanted to see again, and which 
many of us. including myself, had never seen and wondered what 
the place would look like' and how it would compare with what we 
imagined it was when we used to read about it. and many times 
when we had seen places we had watched that anchor come up with 
mud from the bottom of the harbor falling from the links of the 
great chains and we had gazed intently until the anchor itself 
should come and we who had gone onto the forecastle had watched 
it as it gradually crept up. the mud falling from its great flukes, 
and then we had listened for the bells and the great whistle to 
signal that we were going to start to see other wonderful places, 
and now. for the last time, on that cruise we had seen that great 
anchor go into its place at the bow and there was a mingled feeling 
in our hearts— some hearts sad and glad at the same time : some 
all glad and some all sad. I felt that I had had a wonderful 
experience — a chapter in my life that, somehow, would be the last 
of my record when my book about it should be published, and that 
when I should write the words "The End.*" that would be near 
the end of my life. 

My own little home and the dear ones there, nearly o,000 
miles away, seemed more beautiful to me than all palaces, temples 
and cathedrals, and to me the "home stretch*" was a happy antici- 
pation, and there was an inspiring thrill when T felt that the steam 
was turned on and that that immense machinery would turn the 
great shafts upon which were the twin screw propellers that were 
not to stop again, unless by accident, until we came into the dock 
at Hoboken. in Greater New York. 

On April 4th we had only 150 cabin passengers, the others 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE ORIEXT 



335 



haying gone across Europe. The great ship seemed almost deserted 
All of us who had not had the finest state rooms in the beginning 
were now put into perfectly splendid ones, and I had a beautiful 
boudoir all to myself, and we were all put to eat in the finest clinino- 
room. Y\ e had so much room and so many elegancies that it kept 
lis busy trying to occupy them. 

Some part of our time was occupied looking at the 790 Italian 
emigrants when they came out of their steerage quarters onto the 
front deck below ours. There was with us as a cabin passeno-er 
an Italian who was only in the prime of his life. He had gone 
to America just as those emigrants were going, and he had lately 
completed., in America, his residence that cost him $71,000, and 
he had, m his last trip to Italy, given his sister there $7,000 to 
build her a house. 

On April 7th we coasted up close to the Azores. They are 
beautiful and picturesque. For 300 miles there are these islands 
sticking up out of the ocean and it is the presence of these islands, 
that were probably known to the ancients, that gave rise to the 
story of the "Lost Atlantis;' 7 from which the Atlantic Ocean gets 
its name, and it is remotely possible that it is from these that we 
have the story of the Noachian deluge. I suppose it is true that at 
some time there may have been a continent or part of a continent 
along there, but it was probably hundreds of thousands of years 
ago. I witnessed in one of these islands an interesting effect iy 
scenery. The whole island was covered with cloud and fog so tha 
it could not be seen, and a high mountain on it was covered more 
than half way up to its top the same way, but above the fog and 
clouds the sky was perfectly clear, and there rose right out of the 
clouds, in clear view, the top of the mountain. The mountain 
was Pico, 7,000 feet high. I suppose nearly everybody has, at times, 
looked at the clouds and thought that some of them looked like 
mountains. I can remember once, when a young boy, that in the 
back part of a large meadow at my old home, "Forest Ketreat," 
I lay on my back under some very tall wild cherry trees and looked 
at the clouds and wondered if they did not look like mountains. 
I had then never seen any mountain. Suppose, while I was looking 
at those clouds, the top of Mount Pico had shot up above them as 
I was destined to see it in the Azores, wouldn't I have jumped 
up from there and have scooted to the house, p. d. q. ? Yea, verily. 

On April 11th we ran into a fog that rises nearly all the time 
from the banks of Newfoundland, and for several hours for two 
days, each clay, we blew the fog horn as a warning to other vessels. 
We could not see a quarter of a mile ahead of the ship. On that 
day the Moltke made 396 miles. Its record was 402, and it had 



33(5 



DOG FEXXEL IX THE OEIE^T 



twice made 4=01. It was "Good Friday." and it was the only day 
on all that cruise that we had not had splendid music in great 
abundance, on the ship, and after that we had it all the way to 
Yew York each day. But the custom of the ship forbade any 
music on "Good Friday." 

On April 12th. in order to expedite matters in the inspection 
of our baggage, blank '•declarations" were distributed among us. 
upon which we were to state, under oath, just what we had bought 
aboard and were bringing home in our baggage. In order to avoid 
paving the revenue on those articles I suppose that those 446 
Cookies — 445, for I except myself — swore to 10.000 lies, say an 
average of about 200 lies each. I suppose I would have lied. too. 
if I had had any money to buy anything. I heard preachers 
deliberately planning to lie about what they had bought, and I 
heard a nice Episcopalian preacher, one of the two preachers that 
took that tramp with me at Smyrna or Jaffa, I forgot which, say. 
and rather boastfully, that he had succeeded in beating the Turkish 
Government or the' Cooks out of two dollars- for his passport. I 
was the only man. or woman, in that whole cruise that swore to 
the dead, plain -truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth/' 
about what he or she bought and had in his or her baggage. If 
perjury is a crime I. perhaps, the only one in the gang who has 
been in the penitentiary, am the only one of the whole 4^6 that 
ought not now to be in the penitentiary. 

Tinder the head. -Articles Purchased Abroad/' I wrote as 
follows : -Two pins at ten cents each — twenty cents. Charles C. 
Moore. Lexington. Ky. In addition to this I have one bottle .of 
wine that was put in my lunch basket, at Grenada, that I will give 
to anybody that wants' it. Charles C. Moore." When I got to 
New York the Custom House officer looked at my "declaration" 
and said: "You ought to have tried to make it thirty cents." I 
said to him: "I would have done that, but I did not have the 
nionev." He smiled sympathetically. He made me unlock both 
of my suit cases, but with the looking he did I could have had 
in those two cases things that would have cost me $10,000 where I 
had been and that I could have sold for $100,000 in America, and 
the next time I go on that cruise I am going to get somebody to 
stake me before I go. and lie like the rest of them, and do just 
like I did this time and make $75,000. I don't see anybody being- 
honest except some fool who has not got sense enough to make 
money by being a rascal, and any man would rather be a rascal 
than be suspected of being a fool. 

April 12th was Easter Sunday, and the Captain gave a grand 
dinner., and we had music galore. * The preacher that day preached 



DOGr FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



33? 



on the resurrection of Jesus, and made the point that 500 people 
saw him, at one time, after his resurrection. A lawyer remarked 
to me, after the sermon that there was only one man who said 500 
people saw Jesus after his resurrection, and I said : "Yes, and it 
would have been just as easy to say 5,000 people saw him as to say 
500 saw him." That was the day they called on me for a speech 
and I "didn't."' I thought it was a time when "silence was golden." 
A big pious college president, named William W. Smith, of Lynch- 
burg, Virginia, had made an ass of himself in trying to be funny 
and it was a good time for me to keep my mouth shut, and, for once 
in. my life, I had the. good sense to do it. 

Mr. C. T. Aldrich of Worcester, Massachusetts, whose wife is 
a good Campbellite, but is not sanctified and is a splendid woman, 
criticized the church and the preachers on board pretty adversely 
and subscribed for "Dog Fennel." On that day we were talking 
about what phenomenally beautiful weather we had had the whole 
cruise and the purser said it was remarkably pleasant, especially as 
there were so many preachers on board, and he said that there 
was among sailors a superstition that it was dangerous to have 
many preachers on a ship. It is possible that this may come down 
from the days when the sailors had all that trouble because they 
had Jonah on board. 

April 13th we passed the light ship, 200 miles from New York, 
and reported to it. The report was sent by submarine telegraph to 
New York, and the papers had printed our coming before we got 
there. 

On April 14th, one day ahead of the estimate in our itinerary 
we came into New York harbor, and I thought it the most beautiful 
of all the harbors that we had seen. The scenery was, of course, 
greatly different from what we had been seeing, especially in its 
absence of mountains, but as a place to live, while the climate was 
not so lovely as what we had seen, it was, and especially for an 
American, as it seemed to me, the most beautiful of any that we 
had seen, and it seemed to me that, with all of its imperfections, 
our own country was the greatest government on earth, though not 
as great and good as it might be and ought to be, and, as I believe,, 
it will be. 

I confess to never having been very patriotic since our civil 
war, during which I probably would have been in the Confederate 
army, except that I thought it inconsistent with my calling as a 
preacher and also because, though born a slave owner, I did not 
think that slavery was right. But my experience abroad has 
increased my loyalty to my government, though I want, more than 
ever, to cherish that sentiment of Tom Paine: "The world is my 



338 DOG FEN NET j IN THE ORIENT 

country; humanity my brethren, and to do is my religion/'' It is 
a great 'injustice in this government, that claims to put no man 
at°a-nv advantage or disadvantage on account of any belief or dis- 
belief about religion, that it requires its citizens to sign their names 
to passports under the words : "So help me God.'" when there are 
amono- the citizens of this country as good men— and I would say 
women if this government would do itself the honor to admit 
women to citizenship— as were ever born who do not believe m a 
God: and while it is possible that an atheist may sign his name 
under this invocation, regarding God simply as a myth, and just 
a^ if the government had sworn him by the Jupiter, whose great 
temple we saw at Athens, it is. to say the least of it. embarrassing 
to anv consciences gentleman, and inconsistent in the government 
that knows that our penitentiaries are filled with criminals who 
believe in God. and that among the last words spoken by nearly 
every man who is hanged is his expressed willingness to meet his 

G0Cl 'That revolution is an inalienable right of every American 
citizen is a principle that was established by our Revolutionary 
fathers and anarchy by violence, is direct irrationalism and mad- 
ness and not to be countenanced under any guise, or disguise, 
by anv moralist and competent thinker. There is no sense m its 
results as the forcing of anv religious creed upon the American 
people in violation of that fundamental principle of our govern- 
ment that recognized that no religion could be forced upon any- 
body here, the principle the maintenance of which was the very 
orioin of this government. w 

* Now then "let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. 
Thouo-h I have been but little from home during the tew days more 
t n a month since I got home. I find, and naturally, that, my 
friends want to know, in general terms, if I enjoyed my Oriental 
tour and whether I feel that I was paid for all that it cost me 
and whether I would do it all over again, if I could, and had 

twilfanswer this. My father having come to Kentucky from 
Virginia when he was six months old. 114 years ago, when Ken- 
tucky was almost a wilderness, had no collegiate advantage,, and 
Te the wa-a cultivated gentleman because he was a great reader, 
all of his Kfe, of the finest literature. He gave to me every 
SJLi«*hT advantage that I was capable of receiving, and I now 
^vt^ n^wentv years old to-day and had to elect between 
^eo We course and such "a tour as I have just completed I would 
fore oc Ttlie ''sheepskin" and take the tour, because reading and 
My i home may compensate largely, or entirely, for what one 



DOG FENNEL IX THE ORIENT 



339 



may learn at college, while nothing can be a substitute for such a 
tour as I have just had. 

There is always some danger that a man who has traveled will 
want to assume some unwarranted importance on account of it, 
but the same is true of men who have been finely educated ; and 
the man who has been fortunate enough to see some of the world 
should have, in doing so, acquired enough of experience and sound 
judgment not to make himself obnoxious on that account. By 
fair modesty he can always use, as occasion serves, the knowledge 
which he obtained by traveling, for the entertainment and profit 
•of others, and it affords him, as it does me, a storage of reflection 
and memory from which he may always draw for his own enter- 
tainment. 

I think it is the part of wisdom and good finance to save the 
money that is generally expended upon unsubstantial amusements 
and gratifications that perish with the using and save it, even if 
it requires some privation to do so, to be used economically for 
such a tour as I have had. 

People who are cultivated can see the force of what I say, 
without elaboration, and people who have not had the advantages 
of the highest cultivation, and yet have some means, can become 
cultivated, by getting from guide books and books of travel, which 
are generally interesting reading, such information, in advance, as 
will enable them to appreciate in a great degree the things that 
they will see and hear, and can thus become fairly cultivated people, 
much easier and more effectually in time and money than they 
could do in any other way. 

Traveling ought to make us wiser, and being wiser ought to 
make us better, and being better is the only way of making our- 
selves happier, which is the only true purpose of all intelligent 
life. It is also true that any and all experiences in life should make 
11s wiser and better and happier, and as people fail to be these 
from all these other experiences there is no assurance that they 
will be such from having traveled. I do not know that I shall 
be any better man from having taken this tour, but I hope I will, 
and i appreciate the moral obligation that rests upon me to be such. 
You may not see any logical connection between mv having seen 
the Dead Sea and the pyramids and Vesuvius and 'the Coliseum, 
and my being any better man, but I shall alwavs feel that the 
sacrifice that the dear ones at my little home have made for me, 
m order that I might enjoy this craving to see those places that I 
have felt, for more than a half century, should put me under greater 
obligation to do all that I can at my home, to make those happier 
who have sacrificed for me. 



340 



DOG FENNEL IN THE ORIENT 



Probably if I could go again on this same tour, next year, 
without any expense to myself. I might not care to do it. and yet 
again it might be. as with many of those who were with me on 
the Moltke, that in a few more years, if I live. I would enjoy it 
almost as much as I have done this time, again going over exactly 
that same route that I went and seeing again and remembering 
what I first saw and heard among them. 

I thought in that ride in the small boats from Jaffa, and on 
that railway up Vesuvius that if the Cooks would give me the 
Tickets I would not take my wife through such an experience as 
we there had. but I feel now that I would love to go with her and 
as many of my friends as possible over that same tour. I would 
not be so home-sick then. 

I know that in this book I have said many things that may 
seem unkind and ungenerous and that many of them are about 
men and women who were kind and good to me. But I have- 
had a strange life and strange experience and those who have, in 
advance, engaged to pay their money for this book have been people 
from all over America, who cared little for honeyed words and 
flowery rhetoric, and they have been my friends because they 
wanted to read from some man that they believed would say just 
what he thought, regardless of consequences, and I can only sav. 
like Pilate: "What" I have written I have written." and with 
"charity to all and malice toward none." and wishing "bojx voyage*' 
to all who may read this story, wherever they may be cruising on 
life's billowy sea. I tip my sailor's cap and this bring us to 



THE EXD. 



AUG 22 1903 



